Sosthenes of The Seventy Disciples - by a Christian PhD

Sosthenes is mentioned a couple times in the New Testament. He appears in the opening verse of first Corinthians as part of St. Paul’s greeting, where he calls Sosthenes “our brother”:

“Paul, called to be an apostle of Jesus Christ through the will of God, and Sosthenes our brother, to the church of God which is at Corinth...” (1 Cor. 1-2)

The way this line is phrased indicates that St. Paul and Sosthenes are both writing to the church at Corinth.

So who is Sosthenes? One clue comes from Acts. At an earlier point than the composition of the letter to Corinth, Paul was visiting Corinth and preaching the gospel, which agitated the Jews that were there. They were even more agitated when Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, heard what Paul preached and converted, submitting himself and his whole household to baptism. The Jews brought Paul before the judgement seat of the Roman governor, Gallio, and accused him, saying that Paul “persuades men to worship God contrary to the law” (Acts 18:13). But Gallio was a Roman, unfamiliar with and uninterested in Jewish laws. Before St. Paul had a chance to defend himself, Gallio replied, “if it is a question of words and names and your own law, look to it yourselves; for I do not want to be a judge of such matters,” and dismissed them.

Frustrated by this response, the Jews seized Sosthenes and beat him in the presence of the judgement seat, presumably as an act of protest, but Acts recounts that “Gallio took no notice of these things.”

Why did they beat Sosthenes? The book of Acts says that Sosthenes was “the ruler of the synagogue,” even though it said that Crispus was the ruler of the synagogue just a few verses earlier. How do we sort out the details of this story?

Secular historians dispute these issues, as they commonly do with most of the minor figures mentioned in the New Testament. Some argue that Sosthenes was a common name at the time, so there could have been several men with that name. Paul’s friend from 1 Corinthians, then, could have been a different Sosthenes than the man who was the ruler of the synagogue.

Others have suggested that Sosthenes was the same person as Crispus, who is also mentioned in 1 Cor 1:14. There isn’t a lot of evidence to support this claim, however, especially since they’re both mentioned in the same chapter of Acts. The evidence, in fact, points to the opposite view: that they were different, successive leaders of the synagogue in Corinth—first Crispus, and then Sosthenes. This account would line up with the narrative in Acts 18, and we can infer that there was some gap in time between Crispus acting as the ruler of the synagogue and receiving baptism his from St. Paul.

Who was Sosthenes, according to tradition?

If you just had the text of the New Testament, you’d only have a few scattered references to Sosthenes and Crispus—not much to go on. Nor does secular scholarship provide much corroborating evidence, since these figures aren’t mentioned by Roman historians or other contemporaneous sources. But there is another stream of historical evidence: church tradition.

Many things that we know about the New Testament and the early church are recorded in other sources. There are extra-Biblical writings from the early Christians, baptismal records, records of the succession of bishops, and a plethora of other sources like the church’s living memory, its iconography, its hymnography, and so on. When you take all these streams of tradition together, you get a better picture of some of these figures.

What do these sources tell us about characters like Crispus and Sosthenes? We find that Crispus was the leader of the synagogue at Corinth, who was succeeded in that position by Sosthenes. Sosthenes, like Crispus, was later converted by St. Paul. And, perhaps more importantly, both of these men were members of what are called “The Seventy.”

Who were the 70 disciples?

Most people know about the Twelve Apostles, who were something like Jesus’ inner circle. But there was a larger group of disciples (you might call them an “outer circle”) who followed Jesus in various capacities. They are the ones that Jesus chose, in addition to the Twelve Apostles, to go and visit various cities and begin the work of building up the early churches. As Luke describes in his Gospel account (10:1-24), Jesus sent them out in pairs to preach the gospel, cast out demons, and minister to the people.

We know a great deal about the Seventy from tradition, and every member of the Seventy (except for two—Quadratus and Thaddeus) is named at some point in the New Testament. Lots of the people who St. Paul mentions or wrote to in his epistles, including Philemon, Timothy, Apollo, and so on, were members of the Seventy. Many of them are also mentioned in the Gospel accounts. You can read a list of the seventy with details about their lives and where they’re mentioned in the New Testament here.

Almost all of the Seventy became bishops in the early church. “Bishop” is the formal name for the highest rank in church governance, above a priest and a deacon. A bishop’s major task is to oversee the churches in an area, give guidance, and make authoritative decisions on matters of doctrine and church order. That St. Paul was a prominent early bishop is obvious from his many letters to the churches he was responsible for. It’s also why he sent multiple letters to his spiritual son Timothy, who was the bishop of Ephesus, giving guidance about how to run the church there (see 1 Timothy and 2 Timothy). While the exact terminology surrounding the office of the bishop took time to evolve, the roles are clearly present in the New Testament.

Like many of the members of the Seventy, Sosthenes and Crispus were also bishops. Crispus became the bishop of Aegina, which is an island near the Peloponnesus, and Sosthenes became the bishop of Colophon. They were clearly two different people, not the same person with different names, and they were both influential and important, like all of the Seventy Apostles.

What’s confusing about Sosthenes is that, if he was one of The Seventy, he would have been sent out by Christ during the Gospel accounts—prior to the Acts account, but he also supposedly converted to Christianity when St. Paul visited Corinth. How do we reconcile it? It’s hard to say for sure, but there’s no contradiction between someone being a part of the Seventy and not receiving the full baptism or initiation into the Church until the events of Acts.