Titus

Titus was a first-century Christian missionary and church leader, known from the New Testament as a trusted companion and co-worker of the Apostle Paul. The Pauline correspondence presents him as a Greek of Gentile birth who came to Christian faith through Paul's ministry; Paul addresses him as "my true child in a common faith." In the Epistle to the Galatians, Paul recounts that Titus accompanied him and Barnabas to Jerusalem and that, although Titus was a Greek, he was not compelled to be circumcised. That episode made Titus a living argument for the inclusion of uncircumcised Gentiles in the church without the full yoke of the Mosaic law. Nothing reliable is recorded about his family, the city of his birth, or the year in which he was born.

Paul repeatedly entrusted Titus with difficult pastoral and administrative tasks. The Second Epistle to the Corinthians shows him as Paul's emissary to the church at Corinth, sent both to encourage a collection for the poor in Jerusalem and to mend a painful breach between the apostle and that community. Paul writes of the consolation he received when Titus returned with news of the Corinthians' repentance and affection, and he commends Titus's own earnest care for them. According to the Epistle to Titus, Paul later left him on the island of Crete to put in order what remained to be done and to appoint elders in every town. The same letter, together with a notice in the Second Epistle to Timothy that Titus had gone to Dalmatia, indicates that his work continued as an itinerant supervisor of churches in the Greek-speaking eastern Mediterranean. The Pastoral Epistles portray him as a figure of authority charged with sound teaching, the appointment of qualified presbyters, and resistance to disruptive doctrines.

Outside the New Testament, the earliest surviving historical notice is that of Eusebius of Caesarea in the fourth century, who states that Titus was bishop of Crete. Subsequent tradition, reflected in later martyrologies and in the apocryphal Acts of Titus, locates his see at Gortyn (Gortyna), then the leading city of Roman Crete, and describes a long episcopate ending in death at an advanced age on the island. These later narratives supply legendary details of miracles, travels, and a precise lifespan that cannot be confirmed from contemporary evidence; neither a birth year nor a securely documented year of death has been preserved. There is no early testimony that he was married or that he had children, nor was he a member of any later religious order. He was never Bishop of Rome or a patriarch of one of the ancient patriarchal sees.

Devotion to Titus is of long standing in both Eastern and Western Christianity. In the General Roman Calendar he is commemorated on 26 January together with Saint Timothy; older Latin usage kept his feast on 6 February. The Eastern Orthodox Church observes his principal feast on 25 August and also numbers him among the Seventy Apostles, with a commemoration on 4 January. He is venerated as the patron saint of Crete. Relics attributed to him were kept on the island; his skull was taken to Venice after the Ottoman conquest of Crete in 1669 and was solemnly returned in 1966 to the Church of Saint Titus in Heraklion, where it remains enshrined. His cult rests on the New Testament portrait of a Gentile co-worker of Paul and on the ancient Cretan claim to his episcopate, rather than on a medieval process of canonization.