Bucolus of Smyrna

Disciple of the Theologian, bishop of Smyrna

Bucolus belongs to the first Christian generation of Smyrna — the wealthy Ionian port on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor, one of the seven churches to which the Revelation is addressed (Revelation 2:8–11), and a city whose Christian memory runs back to the Apostles themselves. The tradition of the Church makes Bucolus a disciple of Saint John the Theologian, who in his long last years at Ephesus governed and appointed the bishops of the churches of Asia; and it was John, the tradition holds, who set Bucolus over the church of Smyrna as its first bishop. Of the details of his episcopate little is transmitted beyond what the calendars preserve: that he received a small and beleaguered flock in a pagan city; that he was a "wise and experienced guide," steadfast in the apostolic teaching against the errors already troubling the churches of Asia; and that by the grace of God he converted many of the heathen and baptised them, building up the church of Smyrna in the faith.

The Greek service styles him not a martyr but a holy hierarch — one who finished his course in peace — and dwells on the virtues the calendars name in him: faith held as a rule, meekness held as a pattern, self-mastery taught to his people. He belongs, with Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp, to the small and precious company of the sub-apostolic bishops, the men who had known the Apostles and carried their charge into the second century.

Bucolus and Polycarp

The reason the Church remembers Bucolus at all, beyond his own sanctity, is his successor. The strong and early tradition of Smyrna — reflected in the synaxaria and in the local memory of the see — holds that Bucolus, before his repose, consecrated Polycarp bishop of Smyrna, or that Polycarp immediately succeeded him in the see; and that both alike were disciples of the Apostle John. Thus Bucolus stands as the link in a golden chain: from John the Theologian, through Bucolus, to Polycarp — the martyr-bishop who in his own old age could tell the churches that he had "served Christ eighty and six years," and who was himself the teacher of Irenaeus of Lyons. Through this succession the living voice of the apostolic age reached the later second-century Church; and Bucolus, little remembered in his own right, is the hinge on which it turned. (Polycarp, whose martyrdom the Church keeps on February 23, is authored at that day; here he is named in his place as Bucolus's successor.)

Repose and the healing tree

Bucolus reposed in peace, full of years, about the end of the first century or the beginning of the second. The tradition of Smyrna adds a gracious detail loved by the hymnographers: that from his grave there sprang up a myrtle tree, green and fragrant, whose leaves and boughs became a source of healing to the sick who came to his tomb — a sign, in the humble form of a flowering tree, of the life that had passed from the God-bearing bishop into the soil of his city. The myrtle over the grave of the first bishop of Smyrna is the image under which the calendars most often recall him.

Not to be confused

• The Greek name Βουκόλος — properly a herdsman or cowherd — attaches to more than one saint of the calendar, and the near-coincidence of days invites confusion. This Bucolus is the bishop of Smyrna (February 6), a hierarch of the apostolic age who reposed in peace. He is a distinct saint from Blaise of Caesarea, the third-century herdsman-martyr of Cappadocia kept three days before, on February 3, whom the Greek calendars surname ho Boukolos, "the cowherd," from his humble calling — there the word is an occupation, here it is the bishop's own name.