medieval-religion: Scholarly discussions of medieval religion and culture
Aquila was Jew, a tentmaker, and a native of Pontus; Prisca (also Priscilla) was his wife. They had lived in Rome but after an expulsion of Jews from that city were living in Corinth when they took another Jewish tentmaker, St. Paul, into their house and into their lives (Acts 18:1-3). If they were not then Christian, they were when Paul left for Syria, for they accompanied him as far as Ephesus and there instructed the Jew Apollos, who had received baptism from disciples of St. John the Baptist (Acts 18:18-19, 24-26).
Later Aquila and Prisca moved to Rome, where Paul (Rom. 16:3-5) thanks them for having risked their lives to save his (the incident in question is not further identified; the riots in Ephesus of Acts 19:23-41 are a likely candidate) and greets as well the church that they maintain in their house. In 57 they were again in Ephesus ad hosting a church (1 Cor. 16:19). Writing to St. Timothy from prison in Rome, Paul send greetings to Aquila and Prisca (2 Tim. 4:19).
In Acts Aquila's wife is called Priscilla; in her mentions in the Pauline epistles she is Prisca. In the eighth century Rome's _titulus [S.] Priscae_ was known as the church of the holy martyrs Aquila and Prisca. But the standard Western medieval view of their fate is that of the ninth-century martyrologists St. Ado of Vienne and Usuard of St. Germain, who in entering Aquila and Prisca under today place their deaths simply in Asia Minor and do not identify them as martyrs. In the Byzantine Rite, the originally tenth-century Synaxary of Constantinople gives Aquila and Priscilla a joint entry under 13. February, calling them both apostles (which in the broader Orthodox use of that term they certainly were) and martyrs; it also gives Aquila alone, as bishop of Corinth, the first entry under 14. July (other Byzantine synaxaries enter this commemoration under 13. July). Modern Orthodox churches keep both those feasts; the Italo-Albanian church, which also uses the Byzantine Rite, keeps only that on 14. July. Today (8. July) is these saints' day of commemoration in the Roman Martyrology.
Some period-pertinent images of Saints Aquila and Prisca (or Priscilla):
a) as depicted (martyrdom; two male figures) in the late tenth- or very early eleventh-century so-called Menologion of Basil II (Città del Vaticano, BAV, cod. Vat. gr. 1613, p. 396):
http://digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.gr.1613/0419
b) as depicted (Aquila in lower register, second from right) in a calendar composition in the earlier fourteenth-century frescoes (betw. 1313 and 1318; conservation work in 1968) by Michael Astrapas and Eutychios in the church of St. George in Staro Nagoričane in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia:
http://tinyurl.com/hs58fpy
c) as depicted (Aquila at bottom center in the panel at upper left) in an earlier fourteenth-century pictorial menologion from Thessaloniki (betw. 1322 and 1340; Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Gr. th. f. 1, fol. 47v):
http://image.ox.ac.uk/images/bodleian/msgrthf1/47v.jpg
Best,
John Dillon
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