Trophimus of Arles

Trophimus of Arles is venerated in the Catholic Church as a saint and as the first bishop of Arles, in what was then the Roman province of Gallia Narbonensis. Almost nothing about his life can be established from contemporary evidence, and the traditions that surround him accumulated over several centuries, often in the service of local prestige and of claims to metropolitan authority. The earliest surviving reference that presents him as founder of the Arlesian see occurs in correspondence of Pope Zosimus in 417. In the course of a conflict over the ranking of Gallic bishoprics, Zosimus wrote that Trophimus had been sent from the Apostolic See of Rome and that from his mission the Christian faith had spread through Gaul. The letter was intended to justify extensive metropolitan rights for Bishop Patroclus of Arles. Historians cannot determine whether Zosimus was repeating an older local memory or advancing a convenient origin story; no independent fifth-century narrative of Trophimus’s deeds is extant.

A second, and chronologically different, tradition is recorded by Gregory of Tours toward the end of the sixth century. In the History of the Franks, Gregory relates that seven bishops were sent from Rome to the principal cities of Gaul at the time of the Emperor Decius, in the middle of the third century. Trophimus, in this list, received Arles; the others were Gatianus of Tours, Paul of Narbonne, Saturninus of Toulouse, Dionysius of Paris, Stremonius of Auvergne (Clermont), and Martial of Limoges. A third-century date for the organization of the church at Arles accords better with the documentary record than a first-century apostolic foundation. The first bishop of Arles named in a source written during his own lifetime is Marcianus, whom Cyprian of Carthage mentioned around 254 as having adopted Novatianist views. That notice proves that an episcopal church already existed at Arles by the mid-third century, which is consistent with Gregory’s general timeframe even if the story of a single coordinated Roman mission of seven bishops is itself schematic and legendary.

From the high Middle Ages the figure of Trophimus was further enlarged by identification with the Trophimus who appears in the New Testament as a companion of the Apostle Paul. The biblical Trophimus, called an Ephesian in the Acts of the Apostles, traveled with Paul in Macedonia and Asia and was the occasion of a riot in Jerusalem when Jews supposed that Paul had brought him into the Temple; the Second Letter to Timothy states that Paul left him sick at Miletus. Critical scholarship does not accept that this person is the same as the first bishop of Arles. Neither Zosimus nor Gregory of Tours makes the identification; both present Trophimus as a missionary dispatched from Rome. The Pauline connection, together with occasional claims that Trophimus belonged to the seventy-two disciples or had been consecrated by Saint Peter, belongs to later hagiography, particularly as elaborated in the twelfth century when Arles was asserting ancient dignity and when the great Romanesque church that bears Trophimus’s name was being built and decorated.

The cult of Trophimus was centered on Arles. Relics attributed to him were kept first in connection with the church of Saint Stephen and were later enshrined in the church that took his name, the present Church of Saint-Trophime, whose twelfth-century portal and cloister are among the outstanding monuments of Provençal Romanesque art. A translation of the relics was celebrated in the twelfth century. The Roman Martyrology lists his feast on 29 December. He is honored as the patron saint of Arles. No reliable source records the year or place of his birth, the year of his death, his family, or any personal episodes of his episcopate. What can be said with caution is that Christian tradition in Gaul remembered a founding bishop of Arles named Trophimus; that by the early fifth century this memory was already being used to argue for the Roman origin and primacy of the see; and that subsequent ages recast him successively as a Decian-era missionary and as an apostolic disciple, while the historical individual, if he existed as a distinct third-century bishop, remains otherwise unknown.