Phoebe of Cenchreae

The Holy Phoebe the Deaconess, of Cenchreae near Corinth

Righteous · Deaconess

Phoebe is the woman whom the Apostle Paul commends at the head of the greetings of his Epistle to the Romans: "our sister, who is a deacon of the church at Cenchreae… for she has been a patron of many, and of myself as well" (Romans 16:1–2). A Christian of the eastern port of Corinth in the middle of the first century, she is by ancient tradition the bearer who carried the Epistle to the Romans to its destination, and the Church has ever honoured her as the prototype of the order of deaconesses. Beyond Paul's two verses the record of her life is silent; she is commemorated on September 3.

Everything certainly known of Phoebe stands in two verses of Scripture. Paul, writing to the Romans from Corinth about the year 57, opens his final chapter: "I commend to you Phoebe our sister, who is a deacon (διάκονος) of the church at Cenchreae, that you may receive her in the Lord in a manner worthy of the saints, and assist her in whatever matter she may have need of you; for she has been a patron (προστάτις) of many, and of myself as well."

Cenchreae was the eastern harbour of Corinth on the Saronic Gulf, the port for sailings to Ephesus and the East; it had its own Christian congregation, of which Phoebe was a ministering member, and it appears once more in the New Testament as the place where Paul had his head shorn in fulfilment of a vow (Acts 18:18). That Paul commends Phoebe to the Roman church in this formal way implies that she was travelling to Rome on her own affairs, and the natural — and very ancient — inference is that she carried the epistle itself: the subscription appended to Romans in the mass of Byzantine manuscripts reads "written from Corinth, and sent by Phoebe the deacon of the church at Cenchreae," and the tradition passed from there into the received editions of the Scriptures.

The Fathers read Paul's words as high praise. Origen, the earliest surviving commentator on the passage, took it as apostolic authority that women were appointed to the ministry (ministerium) of the Church. John Chrysostom, in his homilies on Romans, dwells on the double honour of her titles — sister, deacon, patron — and holds her up as a pattern to both sexes, noting that Paul names her before Priscilla and all the rest. Theodoret of Cyrrhus observes that her fame had spread through the world with the epistle she is remembered for bearing. The later Church looked back to her as the first and exemplar of the deaconesses — the women set apart, in the East, for ministry among women at baptism, at the doors, and among the sick — and the Byzantine rite for the ordination of a deaconess invokes the grace given to the women who ministered in the apostolic church.

Of her later life, labours, and death nothing has been transmitted; the synaxaria, which commemorate her on September 3, say in substance only that she pleased God in her ministry and reposed in peace. She belongs to that company of New Testament figures whose whole biography is a single luminous sentence of Scripture.

Feast and commemoration

September 3 (church date; Old Calendar civil September 16), together with the hieromartyr Anthimus and the venerable Theoctistus. The commemoration is universal in the Byzantine calendars. She is also remembered in the West (the older Roman Martyrology likewise kept her on September 3).

Iconography

Phoebe is depicted as a first-century woman of dignity, veiled, in the long tunic and mantle of early Christian dress, most often holding a scroll or letter — the Epistle to the Romans she is remembered as bearing — and sometimes, as deaconess, with a censer. No verifiable pre-modern depiction of her has been identified (the Menologion of Basil II search yielded none); her images in circulation are modern icons.

Disputed questions

The nature of her office. Paul's word διάκονος is the common noun "servant/minister" as well as the title of the later ordered diaconate, and commentators ancient and modern divide over how formal an office it denotes at Cenchreae in the 50s. The Orthodox liturgical tradition has read it as an office — she is "Phoebe the Deaconess" in the calendars — while acknowledging that the ordered female diaconate known from the third century onward is a development of what Phoebe's generation knew.
Προστάτις. The word Paul uses of her — rendered "patron," "helper," "protector" — most naturally denotes a benefactor of standing who gave the church at Cenchreae (and Paul) material protection and hospitality; some have pressed it toward a title of presidency, which the grammar does not require.
Bearer of Romans. The manuscript subscriptions naming her as bearer are late antique additions, not part of Paul's text; the tradition they record is nonetheless ancient, geographically plausible, and universally received in the Church's memory.