(2) Ac 19-' shows that the Apostle had in mind at tills time a visit to Rome, which again corre- sponds e.\actly to the indications afforded by Ro lo-^'"- ; cf. 1'".
(3) Timothy and Sosipater (16'') were with St. Paul at this period (Ac 20''). The fact that the other travelling companions of Ac 20 do not happen to be mentioned creates no difficulty ; they niay have bad no connexion with Rome, or they may not yet have joined St. Paul.
(4) Phoebe, a 'deaconess' of Cenchrese, the port of Corinth, is prominently mentioned (16'); possibly she is the bearer of the Epistle.
(5) Gains is the Apostle's host (16'^^), and we hear also of a Gaius at Corinth, evidently in close personal relation to St. Paul, since he was one of the few baptized by him (1 Co 1''').
(6) We bear of Erastus, chamberlain of the city (16^) ; in 2 Ti 4'" we read that an Erastus was left at Corinth, which may thus have been his home.
Some of the.se indications are slight ; (3) cannot be pressed, and the force of the references to Gaius and Erastus is weakened by the frequency of the names. But the tirst two cross-correspondences are very strong, and the data fit in so e.xactly with what we know of St. Paul's movements at this period that the commonly accepted placing of the Epistle might be regarded as indisputable, if it were not that it rests upon an assumption which may be questioned, as taking for granted its integrity. The indications come from the last two chapters ; did these form part of the original Epistle? In particular, even if ch. 15 is accepted, can we safely use ch. 16 ?
2. Integrity. — There are here two distinct, though possibly related, problems to be considered : (a) the original destination of ch. 16, (i) the exist- ence of ,a short recension of the Epistle.
(d) Was ch. 16 originally addressed to Rome? — We are at once struck by the fact that though St. Paul has never visited Rome, and in the body of the Epistle betrays no detailed acquaintance with local conditions, yet according to It)*'"" he .seems to have a large number of friends there. Indeed the list of persons greeted is longer th.an in any other Epistle, and personal details are mentioned freely in a way which suggests a considerable knowledge of the work of the church. It is therefore widely held that vv.'"^ (the concluding doxology offers a separate problem which will be considered under
(h)) would be more in place if addressed to some church where St. Paul had made a long stay. Kphesus best satislies the conditions at this period, and indeed two features point to it directly.
(1) In v."* we find a greeting to Epa'iictus, who i.s called ' the lirstfruitsof Asia. * Ut course he may have moved to Home, and St. Paul m.ay be com- mending him to his new home, but the words are mure naturally ex)ilained as addressed to the church of which E|Kcnetus is the oldest member ; and in 'Asia' St. Paul lirst preached at Kphesus.
(2) Of greater significance is the reference to Pri.sca and AquilaC Salute Prisca and Aquila . . . and the church in their house,' 16-"). We learn from Acts that they had come from Rome to Corinth, where they had met St. Paul ; thence they accompanied him to Ephesus (Ac 18) and remained there. In 1 Co 16'", written from that city shortly before the date usually assigned to Romans, they are there still, .and St. Paul sends a greeting from them and from the church in their house ; similarly in 2 Ti 4'" he sends greetings to them, again at Ephesus. Hence Ephesus evidently became their home. It is of course possible that at the time when Romans was written they might have returned tempor.arily to Rome to settle their business affairs ; their expulsion perhaps left them but little time to |iut them in order ; but the strange thing is that when they were in Rome only for a short visit their house should there, as well as at Ephesus, be the meeting-place of the local church.
These facts, then, suggest that the verses are really a fragment of a letter addressed to Ephesu.s. It may be added that the sudden outburst in v.'™- is certainly surprising if meant for Rome ; it is severe and emphiitic in tone, and suggests that St. Paul is speaking of an existing danger, not of something which may happen, and yet the body of the Epistle gives no hint of the presence there of false teachers of this type (see § 4).
On the other side the attempt is made to rebut these arguments by considerations derived from inscriptions and from archajological evidence.t It is pointed out that most of the names in this chapter can be paralleled from inscriptions found in Rome ; it is not suggested that these refer to the actual people mentioned by St. Paul, but that ' such a combination of names — Greek, Jewish, and Latin — could as a matter of fact be found only in the mixed population which formed the lower and middle classes of Rome' (Sanday-IIe.adlam, p. xciv). We have, however, to allow for the fact that the corpus of Roman inscriptions h.as been greater than those of other places. As inscrip- tions, e.g. from Asia Minor, are studied and cata- logued, more and more of the names of this chapter are found in them too, so that the argument is somewhat precarious. J Again, much stress cannot be laid on the attempts to trace on antiquarian grounds evidence of an early connexion of Prisca and Aquila with Rome. It is possible that the hou.seholds of Aristobulus and Narcissus (vv.'"- ") may refer to the shaves of the Imperial household inherited from Aristobulus, the grandson of Herod the Great, and to those of the Narcissus who was