Trophimus the Ephesian

The Holy Apostle Trophimus, one of the seventy apostles, was a disciple and travelling companion of the Apostle Paul. He was from Ephesus, in Asia, and is named in the Acts of the Apostles and in the second epistle to Timothy.

According to the Acts of the Apostles (20:4), when Paul set out from Greece, through Macedonia, toward Asia, several friends went with him, among them Tychicus and Trophimus, called Asians. Trophimus stayed with him the whole way, to Jerusalem. There he became, unwillingly, the cause of the tumult: the Jews had seen Trophimus with Paul in the city and supposed that Paul had brought him, a Greek, into the temple, defiling the holy place. The mob attacked Paul in the temple court, and the Romans arrested him. From Caesarea to Rome Acts no longer names Paul's companions, but church tradition says Trophimus was among them.

The second epistle to Timothy (4:20) says: Trophimus I left sick at Miletus. This shows that after some years Trophimus travelled again with Paul, after his first release from Rome, on a journey of which Acts does not speak. Tradition adds that after his first release from Rome, around 63, Paul went with Trophimus and others to Spain, and passing through Gaul left Trophimus there, consecrating him bishop of Arles. In 417, in the dispute between the sees of Arles and Vienne, Pope Zosimus gave precedence to Arles on the ground that it was founded by Trophimus, who, the pope said, had been made bishop by the Apostle Peter. Some scholars also suppose that Trophimus is the unnamed brother praised by Paul in the second epistle to the Corinthians (8:16-24).

Tradition says that Trophimus received a martyr's death by beheading at Rome in the time of Nero, together with the Apostle Paul (in the Eastern tradition) or with Peter (in the Western); a service of the apostles speaks of this end, and in his Menology Saint Demetrius of Rostov names him as Paul's companion in all his persecutions, with Pudens and Aristarchus, all three put to the sword. The name of the town of Saint-⁠Tropez does not come from him, but from Saint Torpes of Pisa. The Orthodox Church commemorates him on 15 April, with Aristarchus and Pudens, and on 4 January, in the Synaxis of the Seventy Apostles; the Catholic Church honours him on 29 December.