Suggest an Edit — Phlegon of Marathon

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Biography

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Phlegon of Marathon is known almost entirely from a single New Testament greeting and from later ecclesiastical catalogues of the Seventy Disciples. In the Epistle to the Romans, generally dated to the mid first century, the Apostle Paul writes that the Roman Christians should greet Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, Patrobas, Hermas, and the brothers with them (Romans 16:14). The verse places Phlegon among believers known to Paul and associated with a household or circle in the Roman church, but it supplies no origin, office, family, or further activity. The name Phlegon is Greek (Phlegon, meaning burning or blazing). Nothing in the canonical scriptures identifies him with Marathon or with the episcopate.

From the third and fourth centuries onward, Christian writers compiled lists of the Seventy (or Seventy-Two) disciples whom the Gospel of Luke describes as sent out by Jesus. Catalogues attributed to Hippolytus of Rome and to Dorotheus of Tyre identify the Phlegon of Romans 16 with one of these disciples and state that he became bishop of Marathon. The grouping of Asyncritus, Phlegon, Hermes, and related names in Paul likely encouraged later list-makers to treat them as a related apostolic circle and to assign each a see. Ancient and medieval sources do not agree on where that see lay. Marathon most naturally points to the Attic deme in the Roman province of Achaea, famous from the Persian Wars; some later Orthodox traditions instead speak of Marathon in Thrace. No contemporary inscription, conciliar signature, or independent chronicle confirms the episcopate. Modern historians therefore treat the identification as pious tradition rather than as a fact established by first-century evidence.

No reliable source records Phlegon’s year of birth, year of death, birthplace, place of death, or burial. He is presumed to have lived in the first century in the eastern Mediterranean under Roman rule, but that is an inference from the Pauline context, not a documented biography. Whether he was married or had children is unknown. He did not hold the office of pope or of patriarch; Marathon was never a patriarchal see. He is not associated with any later monastic religious order. Popular hagiography sometimes ascribes martyrdom to members of the Seventy as a group, but there is no early, specific testimony of martyrdom in Phlegon’s case, and such claims should not be treated as historical fact.

In the liturgical tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Phlegon is commemorated on 8 April together with the apostles of the Seventy Herodion, Agabus, Rufus, Asyncritus, and Hermes, and again on 4 January at the Synaxis of the Seventy Apostles. He has been venerated as a saint in Eastern Christianity on the strength of this apostolic tradition rather than by a named, documented act of formal canonization of the later medieval or modern type. Western martyrologies have occasionally included him among the holy disciples, but he has no prominent cult in the Latin West, no securely attested relics, and no well-documented patronages of places, professions, illnesses, or causes. The historical figure remains obscure: a name in a Pauline greeting, later attached to the Seventy and to a disputed episcopal see, whose life cannot be reconstructed in any further verified detail.

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