Suggest an Edit — Aquila

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Biography

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Aquila was a first-century Jewish Christian known from the New Testament as a close collaborator of the Apostle Paul and as the husband of Priscilla, also called Prisca. According to the Acts of the Apostles, he was a native of Pontus, a region on the southern shore of the Black Sea in Asia Minor. He and his wife had lived in Italy before the Emperor Claudius ordered Jews to leave Rome, an expulsion commonly placed in the mid-first century. They then settled in Corinth, where they worked as tentmakers. When Paul arrived in that city he lodged and worked with them because he practiced the same trade. Their household thus became one of the earliest documented bases of the Pauline mission in Achaia.

From Corinth, Aquila and Priscilla accompanied Paul when he sailed for Syria, remaining at Ephesus while Paul continued his journey. In Ephesus they encountered Apollos, an eloquent Alexandrian Jew whose knowledge of the Christian way was still incomplete. The couple took him aside and explained the faith more accurately, after which Apollos went on to Achaia as a more fully instructed preacher. This episode presents Aquila and Priscilla as teachers capable of correcting and completing the instruction of a gifted itinerant evangelist. Later New Testament letters show that they hosted a domestic church, first apparently in Ephesus and later again in Rome after Jews were able to return.

Paul greets them in the Epistle to the Romans as fellow workers in Christ Jesus who had risked their own necks for his life, adding that not only he but all the churches of the Gentiles give them thanks. First Corinthians, written from Ephesus, conveys greetings from Aquila and Prisca together with the church in their house. Second Timothy again asks that Prisca and Aquila be greeted. These scattered notices indicate a mobile artisan couple who moved between Rome, Corinth, and Ephesus, maintained a house congregation, and stood in a relationship of mutual loyalty with Paul over many years. The New Testament does not record children, a date of death, or the circumstances of their end.

Later Christian tradition, especially in the East, numbered Aquila among the Seventy Apostles mentioned in the Gospel of Luke. Hagiographical accounts sometimes describe the couple as martyrs, with varying and unverified locations such as Asia Minor or Rome; the historical sources of the first centuries do not confirm the manner or place of their deaths. The Roman Martyrology commemorates Saints Aquila and Priscilla on 8 July. The Eastern Orthodox Church remembers the Apostle Aquila on 14 July, and some calendars also keep 13 February for Aquila and Priscilla together. They have traditionally been regarded as patrons of tentmakers, reflecting the trade by which they supported themselves and Paul.

Veneration of Aquila belongs to the earliest stratum of Christian memory rather than to a later formal process of canonization or beatification. No reliable ancient source preserves his year of birth or death, the name of a specific birth city within Pontus, or a documented burial place. What can be said with confidence rests on the New Testament portrait: a Jewish craftsman from Pontus, husband of Priscilla, expelled from Rome under Claudius, coworker of Paul in Corinth and Ephesus, instructor of Apollos, host of a house church, and a figure to whom the Gentile churches owed thanks for courage shown on Paul’s behalf.

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