Women Tryphenna

Saint Tryphaena, whose name also appears as Tryphenna, Tryphena, and Tryphaina, is a Christian woman of the first century known with certainty only from a single New Testament greeting. In the Epistle to the Romans, customarily dated to the middle of the first century, the Apostle Paul asks the Roman church to greet Tryphaena and Tryphosa as women who work hard in the Lord (Romans 16:12). The two names are closely related in Greek and have often been understood to belong to sisters or to a pair of close co-workers. Because Romans is addressed to believers in the capital of the empire, the most economical historical reading locates Tryphaena in the early Roman community. The letter gives no further information about her family, social rank, place of origin, or death.

Western liturgical tradition, crystallized in the Roman Martyrology, commemorates the holy women Tryphenna and Tryphosa on 10 November and places them at Iconium in Lycaonia, in Asia Minor. The martyrological notice states that they made progress in the Christian life through the preaching of Paul and the example of Thecla. That localization and the link with Thecla are not found in the New Testament; they reflect a later hagiographical combination of Pauline names with the popular Thecla legend. Iconium (modern Konya in Turkey) was an important stop on Paul's first missionary journey according to the Acts of the Apostles, which helps explain why later writers situated additional Pauline disciples there.

A wealthy widow of royal standing named Tryphaena plays a major role in the second-century apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla. In that narrative she receives Thecla into her house, seeks baptismal benefit for her deceased daughter Falconilla, and shields Thecla from hostile authorities. A historical queen, Antonia Tryphaena, daughter of Polemon I of Pontus, lived in the first century and has been proposed as a possible historical kernel for the literary queen. Whether the woman of Romans 16, the Iconian saint of the Martyrology, and the queen of the apocryphal acts represent one figure or several people who shared a relatively common female name cannot be determined from surviving evidence. Responsible history treats the later identifications as unproven.

No contemporary source records Tryphaena's dates of birth or death, her parents, a spouse, children, or a place of burial. She held no papal or patriarchal office and is not associated with a later religious order. Her cult belongs to the ancient layer of Christian veneration and was never the subject of a modern process of canonization or beatification by a named pope. A distinct martyr named Tryphaina of Cyzicus, said to have been killed by a bull and often commemorated on 31 January in Eastern calendars, should not be assumed to be the same person. Specific patronages attached to Tryphaena of the November feast are not securely attested in the principal hagiographical handbooks.