Archæology and the Bible

by George A. Barton

In Acts 17:23 it is stated that Paul saw in Athens an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. In the year 1909 an altar was discovered in the sacred precinct and temple of Demeter at Pergamos in Asia Minor, the home of one of the seven churches of the book of Revelation (Rev. 2:12, f.), which bore a mutilated inscription; (see [Fig. 299]). This inscription in the judgment of several impartial epigraphists should be restored as follows:[618]

To unknown gods,
Capito,
torch-bearer.

This is not only a confirmation of the statement of Acts 17:23, but of Pausanias[619] (second century A. D.) and Philostratus[620] (third century A. D.) that altars to unknown gods existed.

3. The Date of Paul’s Contact with Gallio.

The chronology of the life of Paul cannot be fully determined from the Bible itself. Such chronological data as the New Testament affords help us only to a relative chronology. Could the year of one of the dates given by the New Testament be determined by a date of the Roman empire, it would enable scholars to fix with approximate certainty the other dates. Hitherto the endeavor to do this has centered about the recall of Felix from Palestine and the coming of Festus (Acts 24:27), but there has been so much uncertainty about the date of this recall, that systems of chronology, differing from one another by from four to five years, have been constructed. A fragmentary inscription has come to light from Delphi, which seems to give us the desired aid for our Pauline chronology in that it fixes the date of the coming of Gallio to Corinth (Acts 18:12). This inscription, as its lacunæ are supplied by Deissmann, is as follows:

Tiberius Claudius Cæsar Augustus Germanicus, Pontifex Maximus, of tribunican authority for the 12th time, imperator the 26th time, father of the country, consul for the 5th time, honorable, greets the city of the Delphians. Having long been well disposed to the city of the Delphians .......... I have had success. I have observed the religious ceremonies of the Pythian Apollo .................... now it is said also of the citizens .................... as Lucius Junius Gallio, my friend, and the proconsul of Achaia, wrote .......... on this account I accede to you still to have the first[621] ..........

At this point the inscription is too broken for translation, although the beginnings of several lines can be made out. The importance of the inscription lies (1) in the fact that it mentions Gallio as proconsul of Achaia, and (2) in the reference to the 12th tribunican year and the 26th imperatorship of Claudius. It can be deduced from these, in comparison with other inscriptions of his, that this letter was written between January and August of the year 52 A. D.[622] If Gallio was then in office, and had been in office long enough to give information to Claudius of material importance to the purpose of the emperor’s letter to the Delphians, Gallio must have arrived in Corinth not later than the year 51. According to Dio Cassius, Claudius had decreed that new officials should start for their provinces not later than the new moon of the month of June.[623] Gallio must, therefore, have arrived in Corinth not later than July.

Paul’s stay in Corinth extended over eighteen months (Acts 18:11), and the narrative in Acts implies that a large part of it had passed before Gallio went there. Paul must, then, have arrived in Corinth not later than the end of the summer of the year 50. As the journey described in Acts 16 must have occupied some months, the council at Jerusalem, described in Acts 15, cannot have taken place later than the year 49 A. D. In Gal. 2:1 Paul says that this visit occurred fourteen years after the visit which followed his return from Damascus. As the Jews in counting time usually reckoned the two extremes as a part of the number, even if a part of them only should really have been included, the visit of Paul to Jerusalem, mentioned in Gal. 1:18 must have occurred not later than 36 A. D., nor earlier than 35 A. D. As this visit occurred “three” years after his conversion, we find, if we make similar allowance for the possibilities of Jewish reckoning, that his conversion occurred not later than 34 A. D., and possibly as early as 31 A. D.[624]

4. The Epistles.

The Epistles of the New Testament, especially those of Paul, are cast in the form of ancient letter-writing. This form in its more stately aspects has long been known through the letters of Aristotle, Epicurus, Cicero, Seneca, Pliny, etc., but the papyri discovered in Egypt afford us many examples of the more familiar and affectionate style of informal letter-writing, and frequently, at the beginning, afford parallels to expressions which are found in the introductions of Paul’s Epistles. The following examples will illustrate this: