Thessalonians. The account of his stay at Corinth in Acts18.1–17
implies that he spent some considerable time in the city. It also
offers one of the most precious chronological indicators for his
career, for it was in Corinth that there occurred a Jewish attack
on Paul ‘when Gallio was proconsul [i.e. governor] of Achaia [as
the Roman province of central and southern Greece was called]’
(Acts18.12).
Gallio is one of the Roman officials mentioned in Actsabout
whom we have external evidence, with the result that he has been
called ‘the lynch-pin of Pauline chronology’ (Murphy-O’Connor
1992: 149). The crucial evidence comes from an inscription in
Greek found at Delphi in central Greece. It records privileges
granted to Delphi by the emperor Claudius (41–54) and mentions
that the basis for the emperor’s actions was a report sent to him
by his ‘friend and proconsul Lucius Iunius Gallio’. In terms of
chronology, the important part of the inscription is the first two
lines. Unfortunately these lines are fragmentary (as indeed is the
inscription as a whole), and in the translation that follows here I
indicate reconstructed portions of the text by printing them in
square brackets (i.e. []); parts of the text that remain uncertain
are indicated by an ellipsis (.. .). Even so, enough survives to
allow an attempt at reconstruction. The lines read:
Tiber[ius Claudius Caes]ar A[ugustus] G[ermanicus,
holding the tribunician power for the.. .-th time, acclaimed
imperator] twenty-six times, f[ather of the f]ather[land,
sends his greetings to.. .]
(Oliver 1971; cf. Smallwood 1967: no. 376)Although the text is fragmentary, these lines can be reconstructed
with some confidence because the language of imperial titles
in inscriptions is very formulaic. The crucial detail as regards
dating is the mention of Claudius’ acclamation with the title
imperatortwenty-six times: the Greek numeral K(twenty-six)
is clear in the surviving text. However, acclamations as imperator
were made on occasions of military victories, and thus they could
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