Auxibius

Saint Auxibius (Greek Auxibios) is venerated as a Christian bishop of the apostolic or sub-apostolic age and as the first bishop of Soli (Soloi) on the north-western coast of Cyprus. Almost everything that later churches have related about him depends on a single hagiographical narrative, the Acts of Auxibius (Acta Auxibii), a text that modern scholars generally assign to late antiquity, often the fifth or sixth century, rather than to any contemporary witness. That narrative presents him as a native of Rome, born to a family of means, whose parents intended to arrange a marriage for him. In order to preserve a life of Christian chastity he left the city, took ship, and came ashore in Cyprus in the district of Soli, a landing sometimes associated in later local memory with the coastal area of Limnitis.

According to the same tradition, the Evangelist Mark, already linked in Cypriot memory with the mission of Barnabas on the island, found Auxibius, instructed him, and baptized him. Because Soli was still largely pagan, Mark is then said to have consecrated Auxibius bishop of that city and to have advised a cautious, gradual ministry. The Life describes Auxibius as living for a time in concealment outside the town, occupying a cave or humble dwelling, and as converting the inhabitants by teaching and example rather than by public confrontation with the civic cults. Over a long episcopate, which the hagiography conventionally numbers at about fifty years, he is credited with gathering a Christian community, providing a church, and ordaining clergy, including a successor before his death. He is portrayed throughout as unmarried and without children, consistent with the story of his flight from an arranged marriage and with the later image of a virgin bishop.

Independent first-century evidence for these episodes does not survive. Soli was a genuine and important city of western Cyprus, one of the old city-kingdoms of the island, and an episcopal see of Soli is well attested in later antiquity; the name Auxibius is firmly attached to that see in the liturgical tradition of the Church of Cyprus. No inscription, papyrus, or contemporary chronicle confirms a Roman origin, a baptism or ordination by Mark, or the length of the episcopate. The Markan connection belongs to the wider Cypriot claim that the island received the Gospel in the apostolic generation, a claim that also draws on the canonical Acts of the Apostles, which record the work of Barnabas and Paul, and later of Barnabas and Mark, in Cyprus. Historians therefore treat Auxibius as an early local episcopal saint whose cult and legendary biography were shaped to give Soli an apostolic foundation, while remaining cautious about any precise chronology.

Tradition holds that he died in peace at Soli and was buried there, and that his tomb became a focus of local veneration. He was neither Bishop of Rome nor a patriarch of any of the great eastern sees, and he belonged to no later religious order. His cult is of the ancient, pre-congregational kind: he was not the object of a medieval or modern papal canonization or beatification. The Church of Cyprus and the Byzantine synaxaria commemorate him on 19 February; the Roman Martyrology likewise records, on the same date, Saint Auxibius, bishop, in Cyprus. Beyond his association with the see and city of Soli, the major martyrologies and synaxaria do not attach to him an extended list of patronages of trades, illnesses, or other places.