Suggest an Edit — Apelles

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Biography

Short Description

Apelles is known from a single New Testament greeting. In the Epistle to the Romans, written in the mid-first century, the Apostle Paul writes: "Greet Apelles, who is approved in Christ" (Romans 16:10). The Greek epithet dokimos ("approved" or "tested and found genuine") implies that he was regarded as steadfast in the faith, but the verse gives no hometown, office, family, or account of missionary work. The name stands among other personal greetings to Christians associated with the church at Rome; it does not by itself prove that Apelles was a native of the city or that he resided there permanently. Scripture does not say whether he was a Jew or a Gentile, whether he had traveled with Paul, or what became of him afterward.

Later Eastern Christian tradition identified this Apelles with one of the Seventy Apostles (or Seventy-two Disciples) whom the Gospel of Luke describes as sent out by Jesus. Catalogues of the Seventy that circulated under the names of Hippolytus of Rome and Dorotheus of Tyre assign him an episcopal see. One strand of that tradition makes him bishop of Heraclea; another places him at Smyrna. The lists are late, internally inconsistent, and uncorroborated by first- or second-century writers or inscriptions. Modern historical judgment therefore treats the identification of the biblical Apelles with a specific bishopric as pious legend rather than as a documented fact of the apostolic age.

In the liturgical calendar of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Apelles is commemorated on 31 October together with other figures from Romans 16 who were likewise numbered among the Seventy: Stachys, Amplias, Urban, Narcissus, and Aristobulus. He is also remembered on 4 January at the Synaxis of the Seventy Apostles. Western martyrologies have not given him a comparably stable or prominent feast. No reliable source records his place of birth or death, the circumstances of his burial, or any spouse or children. He was not Bishop of Rome and did not occupy a patriarchal see. Recognition of his sanctity belongs to the ancient, pre-congregational veneration of apostolic figures; no individual pope or later synod is recorded as having formally canonized or beatified him.

If the man greeted by Paul is historical, he was a first-century Christian of the Pauline circle, known to the Roman church and, by later Greek tradition, associated with the Greek East. Almost everything beyond that single verse remains unverifiable. Place of origin, family, and tomb are unknown, and the episcopal careers attached to his name cannot be confirmed from contemporary evidence.

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