Bishop Publius

Saint Publius is a first-century Christian figure known from the New Testament and from later episcopal and martyrological tradition. In the Acts of the Apostles, after Saint Paul was shipwrecked on the island of Malta while being taken as a prisoner to Rome, the party was received with unusual kindness by the inhabitants. Acts names Publius as the chief man of the island, a title that corresponds to the local Roman official known as the primus or protos of Melita. Publius lodged Paul and his companions for three days. Paul then prayed over Publius’s father, who lay sick with fever and dysentery, laid hands on him, and healed him. News of the cure brought others who were ill, and they too recovered. The biblical text ends the episode there. It does not record Publius’s conversion, baptism, or ordination; those elements appear only in subsequent Christian memory.

From an early date Maltese tradition identified this official with the first bishop of Malta. According to that account, Publius accepted the Christian faith through Paul’s preaching, was consecrated by the apostle himself, and shepherded the island church for many years—sometimes specified as thirty-one years, though that figure cannot be verified from contemporary documents. He is therefore honored as the earliest named Maltese Christian and as the founder of the episcopal line on the island. Later hagiography further identifies him with Publius, bishop of Athens. Eusebius of Caesarea, quoting a letter of Dionysius of Corinth written in the later second century, reports that a bishop named Publius governed the church of Athens, suffered martyrdom in a time of persecution, and was succeeded by Quadratus. Quadratus is often associated with the apologist who addressed an apology to the emperor Hadrian, which has led compilers of saints’ lives to place Publius’s death in Hadrian’s reign, commonly around 112 or 125. The chronological fit with a man already a senior official in about the year 60 is possible but strained, and the identity of the Maltese Publius with the Athenian martyr remains a matter of pious tradition rather than of independent historical proof.

No ancient source records the year or place of Publius’s birth, the name of any spouse, or the existence of children. Nothing reliable is known of his burial. He held neither the papacy nor a patriarchal see, and he belonged to no religious order of the later monastic type. Because he belongs to the age before formal papal canonization, his sanctity is recognized through ancient cult and liturgical commemoration rather than through a dated decree. The Roman Martyrology remembers him on 21 January as bishop of Athens. In Malta the feast is kept on 22 January. Devotion is concentrated in Floriana, whose collegiate parish church is dedicated to him and of which he is the patron saint. He is also venerated as the first saint of the Maltese people. Churches and statues on the island, and the continued use of the name Publju, keep his memory alive, even while historians must distinguish the solid core of the Acts narrative from the later layers that made the island’s chief magistrate into a bishop and a martyr.

The church in Malta traces its origins to Paul’s three-month stay described in Acts 28, a claim unique among Western churches in having a New Testament foundation narrative. Whether or not Publius was in fact ordained, the story of the hospitable magistrate and the healing of his father became the charter of Maltese Christianity. In Athens, the succession Dionysius the Areopagite—Publius—Quadratus belongs to the same second-century effort to give apostolic or sub-apostolic names to the great sees. Dionysius the Areopagite is named in Acts 17 as a convert of Paul at Athens; later writers made him the first bishop. Publius then fills the next place in that constructed list. The martyrdom notice in Dionysius of Corinth is the strongest early evidence that a bishop of that name did die for the faith in Athens, whatever his connection to Malta may have been. Modern readers may therefore hold together two facts: a Maltese official named Publius encountered Paul around the year 60, and an Athenian bishop named Publius was martyred in the second century. Tradition has woven them into a single saint’s life, and it is that combined figure whom the Church commemorates.