Gaius of Corinth

Gaius of Corinth, also spelled Caius, was a first-century Christian of the church in the Roman colony of Corinth in the province of Achaia. He is named in the New Testament in the First Epistle to the Corinthians, where the Apostle Paul states that he baptized Crispus and Gaius there and that he baptized few others in that city, so that no one could say they had been baptized in Paul's name. Crispus is generally identified with the synagogue ruler of that name who, according to the Acts of the Apostles, believed during Paul's mission in Corinth. Gaius appears again in the Epistle to the Romans, which scholarly consensus places as written from Corinth in the mid-first century. Paul there sends greetings from Gaius, calling him host to Paul himself and to the whole church, which indicates that Gaius lodged the apostle and that the Corinthian congregation gathered in his house. The same greeting names Erastus, the city treasurer, and Quartus.

The Latin praenomen Gaius was among the most common Roman personal names, and the New Testament mentions several men so called: a Macedonian companion of Paul seized during the riot at Ephesus, a Gaius of Derbe who travelled with Paul, and the addressee of the Third Epistle of John. Whether any of these is identical with the Corinthian host cannot be shown from the biblical text, and modern commentators usually treat them as distinct. Ancient and medieval tradition often conflated some of these figures. That Gaius of Corinth could receive an entire local church in his house implies a person of some means and a household of corresponding size, a pattern of patronage familiar among early urban Christians, but the sources do not record his family, occupation, or civic status beyond that hospitality.

Later ecclesiastical tradition numbered Gaius among the Seventy Apostles, a grouping formed in post-biblical lists rather than in the New Testament itself. Eastern catalogues of the Seventy, including those associated with Pseudo-Dorotheus of Tyre, present Gaius as a bishop, most often of Ephesus after Timothy, while other documents, among them the Apostolic Constitutions, attach the name Gaius to sees such as Thessalonica or Pergamum. These episcopal claims belong to later legend and are not confirmed by first-century evidence. There is no reliable record of the date or place of his birth or death, nor of his burial. He was not Bishop of Rome, and he did not hold a patriarchal see.

In the Roman Martyrology, Saints Crispus and Caius of Corinth are commemorated on 4 October, with an explicit notice that they are mentioned by Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians. In the Eastern Orthodox Church the Apostle Gaius is remembered on 5 November together with Patrobas, Hermas, Linus, and Philologus, and also on 4 January at the Synaxis of the Seventy Apostles. Beyond the New Testament notices and these liturgical commemorations, almost nothing historically verifiable survives concerning his later life.