Saint Pudens

Saint Pudens is known first from a single New Testament reference. In the Second Letter to Timothy, a text associated with the Apostle Paul and commonly dated to the second half of the first century, the writer, then in Rome, sends greetings to Timothy from Eubulus, Pudens, Linus, and Claudia, together with all the brethren. That notice is the only contemporary evidence for Pudens. It locates him in the Roman Christian community during Paul's last imprisonment and places him in the same circle as Linus, whom second-century writers such as Irenaeus identify as an early leader of the church of Rome. Nothing in the letter states Pudens's social rank, family, or later fate.

Roman ecclesiastical tradition, formed over subsequent centuries, identified this biblical Pudens with a senator of the Cornelian gens whose town house on the Viminal Hill served as one of the earliest Christian meeting places in the city. The site was remembered as the titulus Pudentis and is represented today by the basilica of Santa Pudenziana, whose surviving apse mosaic of the late fourth or early fifth century is among the oldest monumental Christian decorations in Rome. According to the same tradition Pudens, sometimes given the fuller name Quintus Cornelius Pudens, belonged to a family already in contact with the apostles; later stories claim that Saint Peter lodged in the house and that Pudens received baptism from the apostles. These claims cannot be verified from first-century sources, but they explain why the Roman Martyrology describes him as a senator baptized by the apostles who kept the baptismal garment unstained until death.

Hagiographical narratives, above all the late and historically unreliable Acts of Saints Pudentiana and Praxedes, present Pudens as a married man and the father of four children: the sons Novatus and Timotheus and the daughters Pudentiana and Praxedes, both venerated as virgin saints and commemorated in the nearby churches of Santa Pudenziana and Santa Prassede. His wife is frequently identified with the Claudia named in the same verse of Second Timothy and, more speculatively, with Claudia Rufina, a British woman who appears in the epigrams of Martial as the bride of a Roman named Pudens. Martial also mentions a centurion Aulus Pudens. Whether any of these literary figures is identical with the Christian of the New Testament remains an open question among historians; the identifications were attractive to later writers but rest on the coincidence of names rather than on documentary proof. The tradition, however, consistently treats Saint Pudens as a lay householder rather than as a cleric or monk, and it does not claim that he held the episcopal see of Rome or any patriarchal office.

No trustworthy date of birth or death has been preserved. Legendary chronologies sometimes place his death in Rome in the second century, occasionally under the emperor Antoninus Pius, and the Acts locate his burial in the cemetery of Priscilla on the Via Salaria. He is not known to have been the object of a formal papal canonization; his cult is of the ancient, pre-congregational type. The Roman Martyrology keeps his feast on 19 May and styles him the father of Saint Pudentiana. In the Eastern Orthodox calendar an Apostle Pudens numbered among the Seventy Disciples is commemorated on 15 April and, with the rest of the Seventy, on 4 January. Beyond these liturgical commemorations he has not acquired a well-defined list of patronages. The principal living monument of his memory remains the church of Santa Pudenziana in Rome, even though the precise historical link between the New Testament Christian, the senator of later legend, and the founder of the titulus cannot be established with certainty.