Stephen of Reggio
Our Father among the Saints Stephen, Bishop of Reggio in Calabria
Bishop
Commemorated 5 July — Commemoration of the bishop of Reggio in Calabria
Stephen is commemorated on July 5 as bishop (in later Greek usage, metropolitan) of Reggio in Calabria — Byzantine Rhegium, the see at the toe of Italy which faces Messina across the strait and which belonged for centuries to the jurisdiction of Constantinople. Of his life nothing is transmitted. His memory rests on the bare entry in the Synaxarion of Constantinople as edited by Delehaye, and the Greek calendars that print his name for this day add no notice to it. A local Calabrian tradition, of much later date, makes him the first bishop of Rhegium and a disciple of the Apostle Paul, martyred under Nero; that tradition is recorded here but not asserted.
What is transmitted
The whole of the ancient record is a name, an office and a see: Στεφάνου ἐπισκόπου Ῥηγίου, "of Stephen, bishop of Rhegium," in the Constantinopolitan synaxarion under July 5. No dates, no acts, no relics, no miracles, and no manner of death are given, and the Greek synaxaristic tradition that has carried his name to the modern calendars says explicitly that further details are wanting.
What can be said is what the see itself supplies. Rhegium was an ancient Greek foundation and remained Greek-speaking long after the Latin West had ceased to be; from the eighth century, when the Byzantine emperors detached southern Italy and Sicily from the papal patriarchate, it was the metropolis of a Greek ecclesiastical province under Constantinople, with a Greek liturgy, Greek monasteries, and a place in the Byzantine calendar. That is why a bishop of a Calabrian city is commemorated in the Constantinopolitan synaxarion at all, and why the modern Greek calendars call him metropolitan, a title the see acquired long after any first-century bishop could have borne it.
Feast and commemoration
July 5 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 18). He is a Greek commemoration, carried by the Greek synaxaria after Athanasius of Athos and Lampadus of Irenopolis; neither the Slavonic calendars nor the Antiochian and OCA lists for the day name him. No proper office exists; the common of a hierarch would be sung where he is commemorated liturgically.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)
O God of our fathers, who dealest with us ever according to Thy gentleness: take not Thy mercy from us, but by the intercessions of Thy hierarch Stephen, guide our life in peace.
Iconography
No iconography particular to this Stephen is known. Painted at all, he would take the standard hierarch type: standing or bust-length in phelonion and omophorion, blessing with the right hand and holding the jewelled Gospel in the left, with a short or a full grey beard according to the assumed age. Nothing in the record supplies him with an attribute, and no pre-1900 image of him has been identified for this collection.
Disputed questions
- The Calabrian tradition. The local church of Reggio venerates a Stephen of Nicaea as its first bishop, sent (in that account) by the Apostle Paul when he touched at Rhegium on the voyage to Rome (Acts 28:13), and martyred in the persecution of Nero. If this Stephen and the synaxarion's Stephen are the same, he would be a first-century hieromartyr; but the identification is made only in late Italo-Greek and Latin sources, the apostolic foundation-legends of the southern Italian sees are a genre with a known tendency to multiply Pauline disciples, and the Byzantine notice knows nothing of it. This entry therefore classes him simply as a bishop, leaves his century unstated, and records the tradition as a tradition.
- Not to be confused with Stephen the Protomartyr, whose name and supposed apostolic date have contributed to the confusion of the Calabrian legend, nor with the several Byzantine bishops named Stephen kept on other days.