Acts 19:35 - "And when the town clerk had quieted the crowd, he said, ‘Men of Ephesus, what man is there who does not know that the city of the Ephesians is temple keeper of the great Artemis, and of the sacred stone that fell from the sky?’ "

The town clerk was probably a magistrate of considerable authority and influence, comparable to the mayor of a large city today. It is certainly clear from our text that he was the principal municipal officer of Ephesus, who was immediately responsible for the consequences of a riot such as was threatened over the presence of Paul. We might very well compare him to the Mayor of Newark or Detroit or Cleveland, or any other city faced with the threat of disruptive riots.

But this wasn’t the extent of his duty - to keep the peace. He had other functions as well, especially the keeping of records of the city, taking the minutes of meetings, filing copies of all the memorabilia that came to him in the course of official communications - in short, he was responsible for keeping track of the whole mass of documents and other minutiae of city administration.

Also, he might be required to draw up decrees and present them to the governing body of the city, or to dream up ways to provide for a specific reason without being too obvious about it. Because of his abilities in these matters, the clerk often became a most formidable figure and one to be reckoned with.

Further, as the executive officer of a city, he would be the liaison man between the civil administration and the Roman provincial administration, whose headquarters were at Ephesus.

The clerk may have been literally a temple-keeper, for this term, found on Ephesian coins struck around the time of Paul, originally signified a temple servant whose business it was to sweep out and decorate the temple, and which then ultimately grew to be an honorary title to towns in Asia Minor which were especially devoted to the service of any divinity and possessed a temple consecrated to that divinity.