Jason and Sosipater

Two kinsmen of Paul

Both names stand in the closing greetings of the Epistle to the Romans, written from Corinth: "Timotheus my workfellow, and Lucius, and Jason, and Sosipater, my kinsmen, salute you" (Romans 16:21). Paul calls the three of them συγγενεῖς — kinsmen, that is, either blood relations or, as the ancient commentators more often take it, fellow Jews of his own nation. The Church numbers both among the Seventy whom the Lord "appointed... and sent two and two before his face" (Luke 10:1), and their joint feast belongs to the great series of April and November commemorations in which the synaxaria distribute the companions of Paul named in Romans 16.

Jason (Ἰάσων) is remembered as a man of Tarsus in Cilicia — Paul's own city — and as the first of that city to believe, whom Paul afterwards set over it as bishop. He is generally identified with the Jason of the Acts of the Apostles, the Thessalonian believer in whose house Paul and Silas lodged, and who, when the crowd could not find the apostles, was dragged before the magistrates and made to give security for them: "and when they had taken security of Jason, and of the others, they let them go" (Acts 17:5–9). The identification is old and general in the Byzantine tradition, which reads the Tarsian convert and the householder of Thessalonica as one man, travelling in Paul's company; some modern readers keep them apart (see Disputed questions).

Sosipater (Σωσίπατρος) is remembered as a native of Achaia and, in the received notices, as bishop of Iconium, where Tertius the scribe of Romans succeeded him. He is traditionally identified with the Sopater of Beroea, son of Pyrrhus, who was one of the seven companions who went with Paul into Asia after the collection was gathered (Acts 20:4). His fuller notice belongs to his other feast, and is given in the entry for the six apostles of Romans 16 — see Olympas, Rodion, Sosipater, Erastus, Quartus and Tertius (November 10). He is not minted afresh here: the two feasts are two commemorations of one apostle, gathered by the synaxaria into two different first-century companies.

The mission to Corfu

The two apostles are said to have left their sees in the east and sailed westward, as the hymnography of their feast puts it — "having lighted up the East you passed to the West, and there set like the sun in the body, while in the spirit you were raised to God." Their field was the island of Kerkyra (Corfu) in the Ionian Sea, at the mouth of the Adriatic, on the sea-road between Greece and Italy.

There they preached Christ and gathered a community, and there they built a church in the name of the Protomartyr Stephen — by the received account the first church on the island, and one of the earliest anywhere dedicated to a martyr. The ruler of Corfu, whom the Greek synaxarion names Kerkyllinos and styles "the king," had them seized and shut up in the public prison.

The seven robbers and the gaoler

In that prison lay seven condemned robbers, whose names the tradition transmits as Saturninus, Iakischolus, Faustianus, Januarius, Marsalius, Euphrasius and Mammius. Hearing the apostles preach through the nights of their confinement, the seven believed, and their sentence for robbery became a confession of Christ: they were put to death in a cauldron of boiling pitch — the Greek notice adds wax and brimstone to the pitch — and the Church keeps them on this same day as the seven martyr-robbers, "who, learning that a robber's lot was Paradise, hastened to obtain it through burning pitch." The gaoler who had guarded them, seeing their end, cried out that he too was a Christian; his left hand was struck off, then both his feet, and then his head.

Kerkyllinos, Kerkyra and the conversion of the island

The king's daughter Kerkyra, learning why the prisoners suffered, confessed Christ, gave away her jewels and her goods to the poor, and could not be turned by her father's rage. He shut her up, set a robber upon her to shame her, burned the chamber where she was held, and at the last had her hung upon a tree and shot to death with arrows. Her passion and the martyrdoms that followed it are given their own entry — Kerkyra and the martyrs of Corfu.

Jason and Sosipater themselves were cast into a cauldron of boiling pitch and came out of it unhurt. According to the account, this was the undoing of the persecution: the ruler who succeeded Kerkyllinos, seeing that the fire had no power over them, believed and was baptised with the name Sebastian, and thereafter helped the apostles to build churches on the island. The two lived on in Corfu into extreme old age, ordaining clergy, baptising the islanders and confirming the church they had planted, and there they reposed — Jason, says the Greek verse of the synaxarion, "receiving the end of a corruptible life, and finding another that has no end."

Veneration and later cultus

Corfu venerates the two as its apostles and first hierarchs. The church of Saints Jason and Sosipater in Corfu town — a cross-in-square Byzantine building of about the eleventh or twelfth century, one of the oldest churches on the island, and traditionally built over the site of their burial — carries their memory and is said to keep relics of them; the Greek tradition also connects relics of the pair with the monastery of Hosios Loukas. Their feast is one of the principal days of the local church of Corfu, and their names are among the very few first-century apostles whose cultus is fixed to a single Western Greek island rather than to a mainland see.

In the Latin martyrologies Jason and Sosipater appear on July 12, an independent tradition of the same apostles that does not depend on the Byzantine synaxarion.