Reading Inscriptions Alongside the New Testament

Second, the sheer number of extant inscriptions attests to their importance. Literally, hundreds of thousands of inscriptions from the Greco–Roman world have survived, somewhere between 500,000 and 800,000, and new ones are discovered every year. One consequence of this large number is that we possess a diverse dataset of material with which to reconstruct the history of earliest Christianity. Some inscriptions were set up by private individuals as durable advertisements, while others were erected by governmental bodies for official and sometimes propagandistic purposes. The commonest type of surviving inscription is personal: funerary inscriptions also known as epitaphs. Other common types of public and private inscriptions include manumissions of slaves, curse tablets, graffiti, governmental decrees, letters, inventories of temples, law codes, and messages honoring and worshiping rulers, benefactors, and above all the gods.

Third and related to the previous observation, the large number and variety of inscriptions are due to the diversity of individuals who set them up. Unlike Greco–Roman literature, most of which is by elite men, inscriptions were set up by elite men and women as well as non–elite men and women—artisans, gladiators, and slaves. One direct consequence of this is that inscriptions provide windows into aspects of the Greco–Roman world that literature of the period does not discuss.

For example, inscriptions provide a corrective to an androcentric view of Greco–Roman history showing that women were not shut up in their houses, but were a vital part of the Roman economy, that many of them controlled their finances, that wealthy women were benefactresses, and that women were public priestesses and leaders of cultic associations, including synagogues. One benefactress, in particular, was a very wealthy woman named Julia Severa from Acmonia, Phrygia (in modern-day Turkey) who around 100 CE paid for the construction of a Jewish synagogue: “This house was built by Julia Severa. . .” The interesting thing about Julia is that she was also an imperial cult high priestess. In a somewhat related manner, we see Jewish and Christian women in the New Testament who are benefactresses, leaders, and teachers of early Christian churches (Acts 16:14–15; Luke 8:1–3; Rom 16:1–2; Acts 18:24–28; Phil 4:2–3; Rev 2:20).

Fourth, inscriptions provide evidence for local customs, cults, and traditions of Greco–Roman cities that would otherwise be lost. Almost all our surviving Greco-Roman histories focus on historical figures who and cities and events that were of consequence for history, e.g., the Greco–Persian wars, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Rome, etc. These sources tell us little about the lives of ordinary people and average cities. Inscriptions, however, fill in these gaps providing information about the organization of local governments, the identities of deities and humans whom certain cities worshiped, and the daily lives of individuals in these cities. Such data allow for a level of contextualization of the earliest Christian documents that Greco–Roman literature and even papyri do not.

To provide an example, the number/name of the beast in Rev 13:18, 666, has long baffled interpreters. Given that Greek letters doubled as numbers, every letter, word, group of words, and even a sentence or sentences had a numerical value. The manner of calculating such values could be complex. For instance, ina second-century CE inscription from Sparta, which is a dedication to the goddess Artemis Orthia, the numerical value of every third line equals 2,370:“The leader of the young men Leonteus dedicated (this iron sickle as a) gift to (Artemis) Orthia: 2,730. After he won the musical (Moa) contest and he received this prize: 2,730. And (my) father honors me with an equal number of lines: 2,730.”

Inscriptions showcase that disguising a person’s name with numbers was a common practice known as name calculation (known in Hebrew as gematria), which was geared toward people with enough information to decipher the name/number. For example, a graffito from an elite house in Ephesus, one of the churches to whom Revelation was addressed (Rev 2:1–7), records the number of the woman that a man loves and invites a certain person, Gorgus, to solve the riddle: “Now again I love the woman among the gods whose number is 865. If you are Gorgus who finds it, then write it below.” Gorgus (or someone else) was equaled to the task and solved the name calculation of this woman, for in a second hand directly underneath the graffito another person wrote, “Clodia,” which has a numerical value of 865.

Finally, occasionally inscriptions allow for the reconstruction of events associated with earliest Christianity. For example, an inscription from Jerusalem known as the Theodotus Inscription provides the only known piece of Second Temple Jewish material culture corroborating the testimony of Acts 6:9; 24:12 that Jewish synagogues existed in Jerusalem in the late Second Temple period.