Zenas of the Seventy

The Holy Apostle Zenas the Lawyer, of the Seventy, Bishop of Diospolis

Apostle of the Seventy · Apostle · Bishop

Commemorated 4 January — Synaxis of the Seventy Apostles, 27 September — With the apostles Mark and Aristarchus

Zenas of the Seventy, called "the lawyer," is known from a single verse of the New Testament: Paul's charge to Titus to "send Zenas the lawyer and Apollos on their journey with haste, that they lack nothing" (Titus 3:13). The title marks him as a learned man — trained either in Jewish law or in Roman jurisprudence — and the tradition assigns him the conduct of juridical matters in the affairs of the church. The Byzantine calendar numbers him among the Seventy and makes him bishop of Diospolis, the ancient Lydda in Palestine. He is commemorated on September 27 with the apostles Mark and Aristarchus, and with all the Seventy on January 4.

Icon of Zenas of the Seventy — before 1911, Russian (Lives of the Saints synodal edition, 1903–1911) · Wikimedia Commons · pd-old-work

The lawyer of the epistle to Titus

All that Scripture records of Zenas is Paul's commendation to Titus in Crete: Zenas and Apollos are travelling — perhaps carrying the epistle itself — and Titus is to equip them generously for the road (Titus 3:13). The epithet ὁ νομικός, "the lawyer," is unique among the New Testament's persons; it is read either of a scribe learned in the Law of Moses who had come to Christ, or of a practitioner of Roman law, and the tradition followed by the OCA's Life understands it practically: a man of learning who led the legal affairs of the church. That a companion of Apollos and trusted courier of Paul belonged to the wider apostolic circle the Church expressed by numbering him among the Seventy.

Bishop of Diospolis

The tradition makes Zenas afterwards bishop of Diospolis — Lydda (Lod) on the plain of Sharon in Palestine, the city of the tanner's houses of Acts and later of the cultus of George the Great-martyr. Nothing further of his episcopate or death is transmitted; the calendars do not style him a martyr. A later apocryphon, the Acts of Titus, circulated under Zenas's name — a sign of his standing in the tradition as Titus's correspondent-companion, though the attribution is a literary fiction.

Feast and commemoration

September 27 (church date; Old Calendar civil October 10), jointly with the apostles Mark and Aristarchus of the Seventy, by synaxarion notice in the received Greek Menaion, whose sanctoral service belongs to the martyr Callistratus; the OCA presents each apostle separately. Zenas is commemorated again with all the Seventy at their synaxis on January 4.

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 3

Holy Apostles, intercede with the merciful God, that he may grant our souls forgiveness of offences.

Original translation from the Greek

Iconography

Zenas is painted as an apostle of the Seventy with book or scroll — the scroll apt for the lawyer — and in later images as a vested bishop. The stored image, an illustration from the Russian synodal Lives of the Saints (1903–1911), shows the three apostles of the day — Mark, Aristarchus and Zenas — standing together; the same image serves the entry of Mark.

Disputed questions

Name-form. The printed synaxarion of the received Greek Menaion for September 27 lists the third apostle of the day as "Zenon" (Ζήνωνος), where the Slavonic books, the OCA and the older synaxaria have Zenas (Ζηνᾶς) the lawyer; the variance is a transmission slip of the Menaion tradition, and the person intended is the Zenas of Titus 3:13.
Not to be confused with the martyr Zenas commemorated on June 22, the freedman of Zeno of Philadelphia in Arabia, beheaded with his former master about 304 — a layman of the Diocletianic persecution and no apostle.