Saints Aquila and Priscilla

Saints Aquila and Priscilla were a married couple of the first Christian generation and coworkers of Saint Paul the Apostle. What we know about them comes from the Acts of the Apostles and from the letters of Paul, who called them his fellow workers in Christ Jesus. The Roman Martyrology commemorates them together on July 8.

Both were Jews. Aquila came from Pontus, a region on the Black Sea, and his wife, whom Paul calls Prisca and Luke Priscilla, was probably a Roman. They lived in Rome until the emperor Claudius ordered all Jews to leave the city. They then moved to Corinth. It is not known exactly when they came to faith in Christ. Benedict XVI concluded that they were already Christians in the 40s of the first century, before they met Paul.

In Corinth, at the beginning of the 50s, Paul came to know them. They practiced the same trade as he did, making tents, so the Apostle stayed with them and worked alongside them. He spent a year and a half in Corinth. When he sailed for Syria, the couple went with him, and he left them in Ephesus. There they heard Apollos, a learned Jew from Alexandria who taught about Jesus with fervor but knew only the baptism of John. They took him in and explained the way of God to him more accurately.

Their home was a place where the Church gathered. Writing the First Letter to the Corinthians from Ephesus, Paul sent greetings from the couple and from the church that met in their house. Benedict XVI recalled that the first Christians had no places of worship of their own: they listened to the word of God and celebrated the Eucharist in the homes of believers. Sacred Scripture names Priscilla before her husband several times. The reason is not known.

Later the couple returned to Rome, and there too they welcomed the community into their home. In the Letter to the Romans Paul greets them as those who risked their necks for his life, and he adds that all the churches of the Gentiles are grateful to them. It is not known what danger this was. Benedict XVI thought of one of the Apostle’s imprisonments, perhaps in Ephesus. Scripture mentions them for the last time in the Second Letter to Timothy, where Paul asks that they be greeted.

It is not known when or where they died. Later hagiographical tradition gave Priscilla particular prominence, but, as Benedict XVI noted, it is not certain whether she is the same person as another Priscilla, a martyr. Aquila and Priscilla did not go through a canonization process, which the Church of the first centuries did not know. Benedict XVI and Francis presented them as a model of spouses responsibly committed to the service of the whole Christian community and as an example that every home can become a little church.