Priscilla
10 CE · Rome
Priscilla, called Prisca in Paul's letters, was a Jewish believer. She and her husband Aquila were among Paul's most valued co-workers. Acts says the couple had recently come from Italy because the emperor Claudius had ordered all Jews to leave Rome (Acts 18:2). The Roman historian Suetonius records that Claudius expelled from Rome Jews who were constantly rioting 'at the instigation of Chrestus', a notice most scholars connect with Acts 18:2. A later writer, Orosius, dates this to 49 CE. In Corinth, Paul lodged and worked with the couple, who were tentmakers like him (Acts 18:3). They sailed with him to Ephesus, and there they took the gifted preacher Apollos aside and explained 'the way of God' to him more accurately (Acts 18:18-26). A church met in their house in Ephesus and later in Rome (1 Corinthians 16:19; Romans 16:3-5). Paul says they 'laid down their own necks' for his life (Romans 16:4). Priscilla is named before her husband in four of the six places the pair appear (in most modern editions), which many scholars take as a sign of her prominence.
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RomeרומאItaly
What they did here
Acts says Priscilla and Aquila had left Italy because Claudius ordered all Jews out of Rome (Acts 18:2). Suetonius (Claudius 25.4) records an expulsion of Jews from Rome under Claudius, a notice most scholars connect with Acts 18:2; Orosius dates it to 49 CE.
Rome in this era
Under the Julio-Claudian and Flavian emperors Rome was the capital of a pagan empire with an early Christian community. According to Acts, the apostle Paul arrived there as a prisoner around 60 CE; Christian tradition holds that both Peter and Paul were martyred under Nero, c. 64-68 CE.
About Rome
Rome, on the Tiber in central Italy, grew from an Iron Age settlement into the capital of the Roman Republic and then of an empire that by the 1st century CE ruled the whole Mediterranean. Its Jewish community, attested from the 2nd century BCE, is among the oldest in Europe. Christian tradition holds that the apostles Peter and Paul died there, and the city became the seat of the popes. After the Western Empire ended in 476 it passed to Gothic kings, to Byzantium and then to papal rule as capital of the Papal States, until it became the capital of unified Italy in 1871. Vatican City, independent since 1929, lies within it.
In Rome at the same time
Across the traditions, in Rome at the same time
In the same place & time
Sages whose lives overlapped with Priscilla’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
Across the traditions
- Parthenius of Nicaea· Rome
- Didymus Alexandrinus· Rome
- Strabo· Rome
- Seneca the Elder· Rome
- Ovid· Rome
- Tiberius· Rome
- Celsus· Rome
- Philo of Alexandria· Rome
- Valerius Maximus· Rome
- Phaedrus· Rome
- Seneca, Lucius Annaeus· Rome
- Columella, Lucius Junius Moderatus· Rome
- Curtius Rufus, Quintus· Rome
- Pliny, the Elder· Rome
- Silius Italicus, Tiberius Catius· Rome
- Petronius Arbiter· Rome
- Berenice· Rome
- Musonius Rufus· Rome
In the same tradition
Mary Magdalene, Peter the Apostle, Paul the Apostle, Silas, Aquila, Apollos, Timothy, Anacletus, Bishop of Rome, Linus, Bishop of Rome, Mark the Evangelist, Luke the Evangelist
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Priscilla’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
Works
No works attributed in the corpus yet.