Apostle Aquila of the Seventy

Saints commemorated

• Saint of the day

  Apostle Aquila of the Seventy

  Aquila and Priscilla were a married couple of the apostolic age, Jewish Christians and tentmakers by trade, who became among the closest and most faithful of the co-workers of the Apostle Paul. Aquila, a Jew of Pontus, and his wife Priscilla (Prisca) had been expelled from Rome by the emperor Claudius; they met Paul at Corinth, shared his craft and his household, and travelled with him to Ephesus, where in their own home they instructed the eloquent Apollos "more perfectly in the way of God" (Acts 18:26). Paul names them with singular warmth in his letters — "my fellow-workers in Christ Jesus, who laid down their own necks for my life" (Romans 16:3–4) — and greets "the church that is in their house." Aquila is numbered among the Seventy Apostles; the tradition holds that both were martyred for the faith. They are commemorated together on February 13, and Aquila among the Seventy on July 14.

• Saint of the day

  Apostle Aquila of the Seventy, and St Priscilla (1st c.).

• Our Father among the Saints Joseph, Archbishop of Thessalonika (833)

  Joseph the Confessor (c. 762 – c. 832) was Archbishop of Thessalonica, the younger brother of Theodore the Studite and, with him, a leading figure of the Studite reform and of the resistance to iconoclasm. Formed in monasticism under their uncle Plato at Sakkoudion, he was raised to the see of Thessalonica, but is remembered less for his brief settled episcopate than for his long confession: with Theodore he broke communion over the "Moechian" scandal, and under the renewed iconoclasm of Leo V the Armenian he was deposed, imprisoned, and repeatedly exiled for his defence of the holy icons, dying at last worn out by his sufferings. He was also a gifted hymnographer, who with his brother furnished many of the canons of the Lenten Triodion still sung today. His relics were translated, with Theodore's, to the Stoudios monastery, and he is commemorated on January 26.

• St Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain, spiritual writer (1809)

• Aquila and Hilarius

  Aquila and Hilarius are two martyrs of whom the Greek synaxarion of July 14 preserves nothing beyond their names, the fact that they suffered together, and the manner of their death: they were perfected by the sword. Neither their country, their date, nor the persecution under which they died has come down. They belong to that great company whose memory the Church has kept faithfully while the acts of their passion were lost.

• Hellius of Egypt

  Hellius was a monk of fourth-century Egypt, given to a monastery as a child and brought up there in chastity and abstinence, who went out when he was grown into the deep desert and became one of the great clairvoyant fathers. The stories the tradition attaches to him are all of one kind: the obedience of the creation to a man who has recovered his own obedience to God. A wild ass came at his call and carried his load; a crocodile took him across a river on its back; he read the thoughts of the monks who came to him; and a young disciple whom he brought into the desert, and whose night-terrors he stilled with the sign of the Cross, went on to be fed, as his teacher was, by an angel. He died in great age, and the Church keeps him on July 14.

• Heraclius

  Heraclius is a martyr whose whole surviving record is one line of the Greek synaxarion for July 14: he was beaten to death with clubs. Neither his country, his date, nor the persecution under which he suffered has come down, and no century can be assigned to him.

• Justus of Rome

  Justus was a soldier of Rome to whom, the tradition says, the Life-giving Cross appeared in a vision; he believed in Christ, gave away everything he had to the poor, and confessed the faith openly. Denounced as a Christian, he was sent for trial before the governor at Magnesia in Asia, tortured, and at last cast into a fire, in which he gave up his soul — but the flames, the account adds, did not touch his body. The Greek Menaion keeps him on July 14 with a distich that turns the sentence into a paradox: because he would not throw a victim on the altar's fire, he was himself thrown into the fire, a strange victim.

• Nikodemos the Hagiorite

  Nikodemos the Hagiorite (1749–1809) was a monk of the Holy Mountain and the most consequential Orthodox writer and editor of the modern period. Born Nicholas on Naxos and schooled at Smyrna, he came to Athos in 1775 and was tonsured at Dionysiou; there the Metropolitan of Corinth, Makarios Notaras, set him to edit a manuscript anthology of the ascetic Fathers found at Vatopedi, and out of that obedience came the Philokalia (Venice, 1782), the book that has done more than any other to carry the hesychast tradition into the modern Orthodox world. In a working life of some thirty years he also gave the Church the Pedalion (the Rudder, the standard Greek commentary on the canons), the Evergetinos, the Exomologetarion, the New Martyrologion, the Synaxaristes, the Heortodromion, an edition of Symeon the New Theologian, and the two adapted Western manuals known in English as Unseen Warfare and Spiritual Exercises. A leading voice of the Kollyvades revival, he reposed at Karyes on 14 July 1809, aged sixty, and was glorified by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 1955.

• Onesimus of Magnesia

  Onesimus, called the Wonderworker, was a monastic father of the fourth century, born at Caesarea in Palestine and formed in the monastic life at Ephesus, who afterwards went inland to Magnesia on the Maeander and founded there the monastery in which he passed the rest of his days. The tradition remembers him for the miracles that gave him his epithet, and the Greek synaxarion keeps him on July 14 with a distich that plays, as the Church often does, on the meaning of his name — Onesimus, the "profitable" one — and on the Lord's promise that his burden is light. He is not the Apostle Onesimus of the Seventy, the runaway slave of Philemon.

• Peter the New

  Peter, called the New or the Younger, is a martyr known only from a single line of the Greek synaxarion for July 14, which records that he was perfected by having his feet cut off. Neither his country, his date, nor the authority that condemned him has been handed down. The epithet "the New" was given by the compilers to distinguish him from the Apostle Peter and from the older martyrs of the name, and tells us only that he was felt to be later than they.

• Stephen of Makhrishche

  Stephen was a monk of the Kiev Caves who fled the pressure put upon the Orthodox in the south-western Russian lands and came to Moscow, where Grand Prince Ivan II gave him leave to settle at Makhra, some thirty-five versts from the monastery of Sergius of Radonezh. There in 1358 he founded a house of the Holy Trinity and became its abbot. Driven out for a time by neighbouring landowners who feared for their fields, he went north into the Vologda forest and founded a second Trinity monastery on the river Avnezh with his disciple Gregory; returning to Makhra, he gave his house the coenobitic rule. He was the friend of St Sergius, whom he sheltered when Sergius left his own monastery, and to whom he gave the disciple Simon who led him to Kirzhach. Stephen died in great old age on 14 July 1406; his relics were found incorrupt in 1550 and became a source of healings.

British Isles and Ireland

• St. Deusdedit, 6th archbishop of Canterbury (664)
• St. Idus, bishop of Alt-Fadha in Leinster (5th C)
• St. Marcellinus, disciple of St. Willibrod (c.762)

Troparia & kontakia

Readings