Aristobulus of Britain

Among the Seventy, and the brother of Barnabas

Aristobulus is one of that wider apostolic company, the Seventy (or seventy-two) whom "the Lord appointed… and sent two and two before his face" (Luke 10:1) — the second sending, after the Twelve, from which the tradition draws the first bishops and evangelists of the infant Church. His name is written into Scripture at a single point: in the roll of greetings that closes the Epistle to the Romans, Paul bids the Roman Christians "salute them which are of the household ("those who are of Aristobulus," τοὺς ἐκ τῶν Ἀριστοβούλου) — a household, that is, already Christian, gathered about a man the Apostle knew by name.

From that slender scriptural thread the tradition of the Seventy, as gathered in the ancient catalogues (those ascribed to Hippolytus of Rome and to Dorotheus of Tyre) and in the synaxaria, draws out the figure of an apostle. It makes Aristobulus the brother of the Apostle Barnabas — the Levite of Cyprus, Joseph called Barnabas, "the son of consolation" (Acts 4:36), who with Paul carried the first mission to the Gentiles — and so a Cypriot by origin and of the family from which the Church of Cyprus sprang. As Barnabas laboured with Paul, so Aristobulus is remembered as a fellow-traveller and fellow-worker of the Apostle, accompanying Paul (and Barnabas) on the journeys of the mission and formed in the apostolic band before being sent out with a charge of his own.

Bishop and apostle of Britain

That charge, the tradition holds, took him to the ends of the earth. He was ordained bishop — by Paul, the Eastern account says, or, in other tellings, by the apostles together — and sent to preach in Britain, the remote island province at the western limit of the Roman world. The Byzantine synaxaria are explicit and striking on this point: Aristobulus is the apostle who went "to Britain" (εἰς τὴν Βρεττανίαν), and the Eastern Church thus reckons the first preaching of the Gospel in the British Isles to an apostle of the Seventy, of the very generation of Paul — a claim of great antiquity and, whatever its historical kernel, of settled place in the tradition.

His labour there was hard. The synaxarion account has him preaching among a people the Greeks reckoned barbarous and savage — beaten and driven out, mocked and maltreated, more than once, by those who would not hear — yet returning, and by patience and endurance winning many to Christ, baptising them, building up the Church, and ordaining clergy to serve it after him. Later Western and British-Orthodox tradition extends his mission to Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and makes him a founder-figure of the ancient British Church, honouring him under the Latin form of his name. Of the outward frame of this mission — its dates, its places, its historical relation to the shadowy beginnings of British Christianity — nothing certain can be recovered; what the tradition transmits is the memory of an apostle sent to the farthest West and the veneration of the British Church's apostolic origin.

His repose

On the manner of his death the sources diverge, and the divergence is old. The dominant Eastern tradition — the Greek synaxaria and the account followed by the Slavic and American calendars — holds that Aristobulus, having finished his apostolic course, reposed in peace in Britain, among the people he had converted, an apostle who died a confessor's death of long labour rather than a martyr's death of blood. A strand of Western tradition, by contrast, makes him a martyr, suffering for the faith in Britain (later legend names Wales) at an advanced age. This repository follows the Eastern account of a peaceful repose, as the calendars that keep his feast transmit it, while recording the martyr-tradition as the divergence it is; and it accordingly classes him among the apostles and bishops, not among the martyrs.