Paul writes Romans, AD 57

**This is the event that makes the archive possible.** Romans 16 greets twenty-six people by name, plus five households and two unnamed relatives — more ordinary Christians than any other document of the first century names in one place. Without it, the apostolic era would be a handful of apostles and almost no congregation.

**The letter names its own machinery**, which is unusual. **Phoebe** is commended as διάκονος of the church at Cenchreae and προστάτις — patron, helper — of many including Paul himself, and she is the one commended to the Romans, which has always been read as her carrying it. **Tertius** writes his own name into the text: “I Tertius, who wrote this epistle, salute you” — the scribe signing his work. **Gaius** hosts. **Erastus** is named as the city’s treasurer, οἰκονόμος.

**And it contains the sentence this archive quotes most.** Of **Andronicus and Junia**, Paul says they are “of note among the apostles” and were in Christ before him — on which Chrysostom, four centuries later, wrote: *“To be an apostle is great — but to be of note among the apostles, consider what great praise that is. Oh, how great is the devotion of this woman, that she should be counted worthy of the name of apostle.”*

**What the list shows without saying it.** Of the twenty-six named, at least seven are women. Several names — Ampliatus, Urbanus, Hermes, Persis, Tryphena, Tryphosa — are the ordinary names of slaves and freedmen; two households are named by their masters, Aristobulus and Narcissus, which is how the enslaved appear in the record at all; and Rufus’s mother and Nereus’s sister appear without names of their own. **The archive holds every one of them**, and the composition of the list is the evidence: the Roman church of AD 57 was not a gathering of notables.