S. Onesiphori, Discipuli Apostolorum et Martyris — Roman Martyrology, 6 September
A Martyrology entry. Saint Onesiphorus has no Mass in the 1962 Missale Romanum*; the sixth of September is a feria in the General Calendar, and in the present year falls on the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost. He is named at Prime in the reading of the Martyrology, and his memory is kept here on that authority alone.*
Det misericordiam Dominus Onesiphori domui: quia sæpe me refrigeravit, et catenam meam non erubuit. “The Lord give mercy to the house of Onesiphorus: because he hath often refreshed me, and hath not been ashamed of my chain.” — 2 Timothy 1:16
I. Identitas et Origines
Everything that can be securely known of Onesiphorus is contained in four verses of Saint Paul’s last letter, and the Church has been content, for nineteen centuries, to keep his feast on that small foundation.
He appears twice in the Second Epistle to Timothy. In the first chapter, Paul — a prisoner at Rome, deserted by “all they who are in Asia” (2 Tim. 1:15) — sets one name against the general defection: Onesiphorus, who “often refreshed” him, who “was not ashamed of my chain,” who on coming to Rome “carefully sought me, and found me,” and whose services at Ephesus Timothy himself “very well knowest” (2 Tim. 1:16-18). In the closing greetings the Apostle salutes “the household of Onesiphorus” (2 Tim. 4:19). That is the whole of the primary record, and it is a record of the first rank: the words of an Apostle, written within months of his death, about a man he knew.
From these verses three things follow with reasonable certainty. He was a Christian of Ephesus, or at least a man whose labours there were known to the Ephesian church. He was a man of some means and of a household — the word Paul uses, oikos, implies a family and probably servants, and the refrigeria he supplied to the prisoner suggest one who could afford them. And he was a man who travelled: he came to Rome, whether on business or for Paul’s sake, and when he arrived he did not wait to be found.
His name means “profit-bringer,” and Saint John Chrysostom, preaching on the passage, could not resist observing that the man was what his name said.
Beyond Scripture, the traditions divide, and it is best to say so at once. The Greek Church counts him among the Seventy Disciples of Luke 10, a tradition whose formation belongs to the early centuries but which the Roman books do not assert; the Roman Martyrology calls him more cautiously discipulus Apostolorum. The apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla, a second-century composition from Asia Minor, make an Onesiphorus of Iconium the host who receives Paul into his house and whose family are the first hearers of the Apostle’s preaching in that city. Tertullian already knew this work and already knew it to be the invention of a presbyter of Asia, who was deposed for writing it; the identification of its Onesiphorus with the friend of 2 Timothy is therefore a matter of later piety rather than of history, and this life does not build on it.
II. Vitae Ratio et Virtutes
The Fathers who comment on the passage are struck, almost without exception, by the same word: Onesiphorus was not ashamed.
The shame in question was real and specific. Paul’s Roman imprisonment was not the loose custody of the Acts, in which he received visitors in his own hired lodging; the tone of the letter — “I am even now ready to be sacrificed, and the time of my dissolution is at hand” (4:6) — belongs to a capital case, and to attach oneself publicly to a man on trial for his life under Nero was to invite the notice of the same court. “All they who are in Asia” had drawn the obvious conclusion. The Apostle names two of them, Phigellus and Hermogenes, and then, as if to wash the taste out of his mouth, names Onesiphorus.
Chrysostom draws the moral without mercy for his hearers: it is a small thing to honour a man in prosperity; the test of friendship is the chain. He notes that Paul does not merely say Onesiphorus visited him, but that he sought him — diligentius quæsivit — and that in a city the size of Rome, with a prisoner whose whereabouts it was dangerous to ask about, the seeking was itself a labour and a risk. Theodoret, more briefly, makes the same point: Onesiphorus did not wait to be summoned, nor did he count the danger.
Here is the virtue for which the Church keeps his memory: not learning, not eloquence, not the government of churches, but a faithfulness that did not calculate. He is, one might say, the patron of the visit that costs something. Saint Thomas, in his lectures on the epistle, observes that Paul’s praise falls on two works of mercy at once — the corporal, in the refrigeria, and the spiritual, in the consolation of a man abandoned — and that both are the more meritorious for having been done to one whom the world had already condemned.
III. Apostolatus
Of any apostolate in the formal sense the record is silent, and the silence should be respected.
That he laboured in the church of Ephesus is Paul’s own word — “in how many things he ministered unto me at Ephesus, thou very well knowest” — and the ministry there was presumably of the same kind as at Rome: the support of the Apostle and of the community that had grown up around him during the three years of Acts 19. Whether he held office in that church is not said.
The Byzantine synaxaria supply what Scripture withholds. In them Onesiphorus, numbered with the Seventy, becomes a bishop — of Colophon near Ephesus in most recensions, of Corone in others — and is sent out from Ephesus as a preacher of the Gospel. These notices are of the ordinary type by which the Greek Church furnished every name in the apostolic letters with a see, and they cannot be verified. They are recorded here as traditio pia: honourable, ancient, and unproven.
IV. Mors et Cultus
The Roman Martyrology, under the sixth of September, gives the substance of the Western tradition: that at Ephesus is kept the natalis of Saint Onesiphorus, disciple of the Apostles, of whom Saint Paul writes to Timothy; that under the Emperor Domitian and the proconsul Adrian, at the Hellespont, together with Porphyrius, he was beaten, and then bound to wild horses and dragged until he died.
Every element of this notice is Tier 3 except the first. The martyrdom, the companion, the persecutor, the place, and the manner of death all derive from the Greek Passion of Onesiphorus and Porphyrius, in which Porphyrius is his servant and the scene is Parium on the Hellespont. The Passion is late and legendary in form; its Domitianic date is the conventional one assigned to apostolic-generation martyrs whose actual circumstances had been forgotten; and the proconsul Adrian is otherwise unknown. Cardinal Baronius, revising the Martyrology in the sixteenth century, took the notice over from the Greek menologies, and the Roman books have kept it since.
It is worth noticing, against this, a small piece of internal evidence from Scripture itself. Paul twice speaks of the house of Onesiphorus and never of Onesiphorus in person: he asks mercy for the household in the present, and for the man himself “in that day.” Many commentators, Catholic and other, have read this as an indication that Onesiphorus was already dead when the letter was written — which would place his death before Paul’s, under Nero rather than Domitian, and at Rome or on the road from it rather than at the Hellespont. The reading is probable rather than certain. But it has a consequence to which the next section will return.
Of relics nothing is securely known, and no church of Onesiphorus can be shown to have existed at Ephesus or Parium. His cult is a cult of the name — carried, as with so many of the Seventy, entirely by the text of the Apostle.
The Greek Church keeps him on the seventh of September, with Evodus, and again on the fourth of January in the common synaxis of the Seventy Apostles. The Roman Martyrology, which received him from the Greeks, keeps him one day earlier. The reformed Martyrology of 2001 retains him.
V. Documenta Spiritualia
He left no writings. What he left is a text written about him, and that text became, by a providence he could not have foreseen, one of the fixed points of a doctrine.
“The Lord grant unto him to find mercy of the Lord in that day” (2 Tim. 1:18). If Onesiphorus was living when Paul wrote, this is a prayer for a living friend. If, as the greetings suggest, he was dead, it is a prayer for the dead — the only unambiguous one in the New Testament — written by an Apostle, and asking for the departed precisely what the Church has always asked: not that he be raised, not that he be remembered, but that he find mercy at the judgment. The Fathers did not press the point, because they did not need to; the practice was universal and the Second Book of Machabees was in their canon. It was the Reformers’ rejection of prayer for the dead that made the verse controversial, and Catholic theologians from Bellarmine onward have appealed to it accordingly. The argument is not a demonstration: it rests on an inference about a man’s death from the shape of a greeting. But it is a sound inference, and the Church’s reading of the verse is at least as old as the Greek commentators who noted the household greeting and drew the conclusion.
So the man who was not ashamed of Paul’s chain has become, in the economy of Scripture, a witness to the communion of saints across death — the friend for whom the Apostle prayed when he could no longer be visited. There is a fittingness in that which no legend improves upon.
The practical documentum of his life is the Apostle’s own summary, and it can be memorized: sæpe me refrigeravit, et catenam meam non erubuit. He refreshed often. He was not ashamed of the chain.
VI. Oratio
Saint Onesiphorus has no proper Collect, and the sixth of September has no Mass of his own in the 1962 Missal. The prayer proper to his memory is therefore the Apostle’s, which the Church has read over him from the beginning:
Det illi Dominus invenire misericordiam a Domino in illa die. “The Lord grant unto him to find mercy of the Lord in that day.” (2 Tim. 1:18)
For private devotion, the Collect of the Common of one Martyr not a Bishop may be said with his name, as the Church herself would say it were his Mass ever to be given:
Præsta, quæsumus, omnipotens Deus: ut, intercedente beato Onesiphoro Martyre tuo, et a cunctis adversitatibus liberemur in corpore, et a pravis cogitationibus mundemur in mente. Per Dominum nostrum. “Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God, that by the intercession of blessed Onesiphorus Thy Martyr, we may be delivered from all adversities in body, and be cleansed from all evil thoughts in mind. Through our Lord.”
This is a devotional adaptation and not a liturgical text of the day.
VII. Aspiratio
Sancte Onesiphore, qui Apostolum vinctum quæsisti et invenisti, nec catenam eius erubuisti: impetra nobis ut Christum in fratribus derelictis quæramus, inveniamus, et non erubescamus.
“Saint Onesiphorus, who sought and found the Apostle in his bonds and wast not ashamed of his chain: obtain for us that we may seek Christ in our abandoned brethren, find Him, and be not ashamed.”
Practice
Examine. Is there someone whose association has become inconvenient to you — a friend in disgrace, a relative under a cloud, a fellow Catholic whose difficulties it would be simpler not to notice? Paul had many friends in prosperity. He records one in prison.
Do. Visit a prisoner, a shut-in, or someone the world has set aside, this week — in person if you can, by letter if you cannot. Saint Onesiphorus did not send his regards from Ephesus. He came to Rome and looked.
Pray. For the dead by name, and especially for one whom no one else remembers. The prayer for Onesiphorus was a prayer for a friend who could no longer be repaid.
Devote. The Fourth Sorrowful Mystery, the Carrying of the Cross, attending to Simon of Cyrene and to the women who did not turn away; or the De profundis, said for a departed friend.
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
Primary witness. 2 Timothy 1:15-18 and 4:19 (Douay-Rheims; Vulgate). The whole of the historical record.
Patristic commentary. Saint John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Second Epistle to Timothy, on chapter 1 (in the third homily); Theodoret of Cyrus, Interpretation of the Second Epistle to Timothy, on the same verses; Saint Thomas Aquinas, Lectures on the Second Epistle to Timothy, chapter 1.
Tradition. The Roman Martyrology, 6 September; the Greek synaxaria for 7 September and 4 January; the Acts of Paul and Thecla (for the Iconium tradition, with Tertullian’s De baptismo 17 on their authorship).
Doctrine. On 2 Timothy 1:18 and prayer for the dead: Saint Robert Bellarmine, De controversiis, the treatise on Purgatory, and the standard manuals of dogmatic theology on the suffragia pro defunctis.
If you wish to go deeper: the Theology and Doctrine path takes up the scriptural foundations of prayer for the dead — 2 Machabees 12, 1 Corinthians 15:29, and this verse — and the doctrine of Purgatory as defined at Florence and Trent. The East-West Comparative thread continues with the question of the Seventy: how the Byzantine synaxarion and the Roman Martyrology weight the same apostolic names, and why the West has been the more reticent of the two.
Sancte Onesiphore, ora pro nobis.