Aquila and Priscilla

The holy Apostles Aquila and Priscilla were a Jewish-⁠Christian married couple of the first century, tentmakers by trade, who gave Saint Paul a home and shared his labour for the Gospel. Aquila is traditionally counted among the seventy apostles. The Orthodox Church keeps their memory together on 13 February, and Aquila alone on 14 July.

Rome, Corinth and Paul

Aquila was a Jew born in Pontus, in northern Asia Minor, and his wife is called Priscilla, or Prisca in the short form, in the New Testament. They had lived at Rome until the emperor Claudius ordered the Jews out of the city, and they came to Corinth (Acts 18:2). Historians still debate whether the edict dates from 41 or 49. Paul, who made tents too, joined them, and he lived and worked in their house while he preached in Corinth for eighteen months. Acts does not say whether they already believed in Christ or became Christians through him, but the Greek synaxarion says that Paul instructed and baptized them.

When Paul left Corinth by way of Cenchrea for Syria, Aquila and Priscilla sailed with him as far as Ephesus and stayed there (Acts 18:18-19). They worked on at their trade and served the Church.

Teachers of Apollos

At Ephesus they heard Apollos, an eloquent Jew of Alexandria, mighty in the Scriptures, speaking boldly in the synagogue. He taught accurately about Jesus, but knew only the baptism of John. Priscilla and Aquila took him aside and explained the way of God more accurately to him (Acts 18:24-26). Apollos afterwards crossed to Achaia and was a great help to the believers there. In this passage Priscilla is named before her husband, as in three other places in the New Testament, and the Church has seen in this a sign of the part she took in the teaching.

In the letters of Paul

Six times the New Testament names the couple, and always together. In the First Letter to the Corinthians, written from Ephesus, Paul passes on greetings from Aquila and Prisca, and from the church that met in their house (16:19). In the Letter to the Romans, which was written around 56 or 57, he greets them as his fellow workers in Christ Jesus, who risked their necks for his life, and says that not he alone, but all the churches of the Gentiles, give thanks for them. He greets also the church in their house (16:3-5), so they were again at Rome, where the edict no longer held. In the Second Letter to Timothy, from Paul's last imprisonment, he sends them his greetings once more (4:19).

Tradition after the New Testament

The sources give little certain detail about their last years. Church tradition says that Paul made Aquila a bishop in Asia Minor, and the Apostolic Constitutions name him as one of the first bishops there. The Greek synaxarion says that persecutors arrested the couple and beheaded them, so that they bear the names of both apostles and martyrs. The hymn for the day calls them leaders of a church in their house and fellow workers of Paul.

Some modern scholars have proposed that Priscilla wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews, but this is a minority view and no ancient writer says it. The Catholic Church and the Anglican Communion remember the pair on 8 July.