Apostle Aquila of the Seventy

Aquila was a Jewish tentmaker of Pontus, born to a family that had been expelled from Italy by the Emperor Claudius's edict against the Jews of Rome in 49 AD. With his wife Priscilla — a Christian convert who would shape his own faith — he settled at Corinth, where they met the Apostle Paul on his second missionary journey. Paul lodged with them, worked alongside them at their trade, and they became among his most intimate fellow-laborers in the Gospel.

They followed Paul to Ephesus, where they helped to plant the church there, and afterward returned to Rome, where their house served as one of the principal house-churches of the imperial city. Paul greets them by name in three of his letters — Romans, First Corinthians, and Second Timothy — and calls them "my fellow-workers in Christ Jesus, who for my life laid down their own necks." At Ephesus they instructed the Alexandrian preacher Apollos "the way of God more perfectly," supplying what was lacking in his understanding of the Christian baptism.

Aquila is reckoned among the Seventy, and tradition makes him a martyr; he and Priscilla were finally beheaded together for the faith, perhaps under Nero. Their joint feast is kept on July 14, with the Synaxis of the Seventy on January 4.