Sanctus Cleophas, Discipulus Domini — Roman Martyrology, 25 September
Kept on Feria Sexta infra Hebdomadam XVII post Octavam Pentecostes, anno Domini MMXXVI
Apud Emmaus Palæstinæ natalis sancti Cleophæ, discipuli Christi; qui pro confessione Domini ab Iudæis, ut traditur, occisus, in eadem domo, ubi Dominus in memoriam sui convivium celebraverat, honorifice sepultus est.
“At Emmaus in Palestine, the birthday of blessed Cleophas, disciple of Christ, who, as is handed down, was slain for the confession of the Lord, and was honourably buried in that same house where the Lord had celebrated the banquet in remembrance of Himself.” — Roman Martyrology, xxv September
A note on the standing of this entry. Saint Cleopas has no Mass in the 1962 Missale Romanum and no place in the General Calendar. He is commemorated in the Roman Martyrology only, and the twenty-fifth of September is liturgically a feria. He is nevertheless read aloud in the Roman rite every year, for the Emmaus pericope in which he is named is the Gospel of Easter Monday. He is thus a saint without a feast whose one recorded day is proclaimed on the second day of Easter — which is, in its way, the whole of what follows.
I. Identitas et Origines
He is named once in all of Scripture. On the afternoon of the Resurrection two disciples are walking to a village some sixty stadia from Jerusalem; the risen Lord joins them unrecognised and asks what they are discussing; and one of them, cui nomen Cleophas, answers with the question that has become proverbial: Tu solus peregrinus es in Ierusalem, et non cognovisti quæ facta sunt in illa his diebus? — “Art thou only a stranger in Jerusalem, and hast not known the things that have been done there in these days?” (Luke 24:18).
The name in Luke’s Greek is Κλεοπάς, a shortened familiar form of Κλεόπατρος — a thoroughly Greek name, of the kind borne by Hellenised Jews of the period.
Here the first difficulty arises, and it should be stated before anything is built upon it. St. John records at the Cross Maria Cleophæ — “Mary of Clopas” (John 19:25). The Greek there is Κλωπᾶς, which is not the same word: it is not a Greek name at all but a Greek spelling of a Semitic one, and is widely held to stand behind the Alphæus (Ἁλφαῖος, from the Aramaic Ḥalphai) of the Gospels. The Latin Vulgate renders both men Cleophas, and the English versions followed the Latin. The identification of the Emmaus disciple with the husband of the Mary at the Cross is therefore, in large part, an artefact of Latin spelling rather than a datum of the text.
What hangs on the identification is considerable, and it is well attested in its own right. Hegesippus, a Palestinian writer of the second century whose work survives in the citations of Eusebius, reports that Clopas was the brother of St. Joseph, and that his son Symeon was chosen to succeed St. James the Just as bishop of Jerusalem, and was martyred under Trajan at a great age (Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica III.11; III.32; IV.22). If the Emmaus disciple is that man, then Cleopas is the Lord’s kinsman by affinity, uncle to Him as He was reckoned in the eyes of men, husband of one of the women who stood at Calvary, and father of the second bishop of the mother church. The Latin doctors and commentators — Bede among them, and after him the whole weight of the later Latin tradition down to Cornelius a Lapide — read him so.
The sober position is this. That Clopas was Joseph’s brother and Symeon’s father is strongly attested tradition, resting on a second-century Palestinian witness: Tier 2. That the Cleopas of Luke 24 is that same Clopas is a pious and ancient identification with real Latin authority behind it, but it is not demanded by the Greek and is not to be asserted as fact: Tier 3, retained devotionally, held loosely.
His companion on the road is not named, and the tradition has never agreed on who he was. St. Epiphanius takes him for Nathanael. A current of Eastern and Western commentators proposes Simon. Some Latins proposed St. Luke himself, which the Evangelist’s own preface appears to exclude, since he numbers himself among those who received the tradition from the eyewitnesses rather than among the eyewitnesses (Luke 1:2). The Church has never ruled. The anonymity is more likely to be a gift than a gap: one seat on that road is left open, and the reader is invited to take it.
Of his origin, family, trade, age and end, Scripture says nothing whatever. Everything else we possess about him comes either from Hegesippus by way of the identification argued above, or from the Martyrology’s notice of his death, treated below.
II. Vitæ Ratio et Virtutes
We have of Cleopas one afternoon, and it is enough for a character.
He grieves honestly. Luke says the two walked tristes — sad — and when the stranger asks what they are speaking of, they stop in the road. Their summary of the Passion is exact and complete and faithless: Jesus of Nazareth was a prophet mighty in work and word, the chief priests delivered Him to be condemned and crucified, nos autem sperabamus quia ipse esset redempturus Israel — “but we hoped that it was He that should have redeemed Israel” (Luke 24:21). That imperfect tense, sperabamus, is one of the saddest verbs in Scripture. They have the facts and they have lost the meaning. They even report the women’s news of the empty tomb, and report it as a further perplexity rather than as a hope.
He is rebuked and does not take offence. O stulti et tardi corde ad credendum in omnibus quæ locuti sunt prophetæ! — “O foolish and slow of heart to believe in all things which the prophets have spoken!” (Luke 24:25). The stranger then opens the Law and the Prophets and shows that the Christ had to suffer these things and so enter into His glory. Cleopas does not defend himself and does not turn back. He listens, and afterward he can name what happened to him while he listened: Nonne cor nostrum ardens erat in nobis, dum loqueretur in via, et aperiret nobis Scripturas? — “Was not our heart burning within us, whilst He spoke in the way, and opened to us the Scriptures?” (Luke 24:32).
He keeps the stranger. This is the hinge of the whole account and the particular virtue for which the Church remembers him. They reach the village; the Lord se finxit longius ire, made as though He would go further; and they constrain Him — coegerunt illum — with the words that the Church has never stopped saying: Mane nobiscum, quoniam advesperascit, et inclinata est iam dies. “Stay with us, because it is towards evening, and the day is now far spent” (Luke 24:29).
St. Gregory the Great, preaching on this Gospel, presses the point without mercy and without qualification: the Lord was not recognised while He expounded, and was recognised while He was given hospitality; therefore the commandments of God are not illuminated in the hearing but in the doing (Homiliæ in Evangelia, Hom. XXIII). The two disciples had the exposition of the Scriptures from the mouth of the incarnate Word Himself, and they remained in the dark. They opened a door to a stranger, and their eyes were opened. Gregory’s conclusion — that whoever wishes to understand what he has heard must hurry to do what he has already understood — is the entire practical doctrine of this feast.
He recognises Him in the breaking of bread, and loses Him in the same instant. Et factum est, dum recumberet cum eis, accepit panem, et benedixit, ac fregit, et porrigebat illis. Et aperti sunt oculi eorum, et cognoverunt eum: et ipse evanuit ex oculis eorum (Luke 24:30-31). The guest becomes the host in his own house. The four verbs are the verbs of the Supper. And the moment the eyes are opened, the visible presence is withdrawn — which St. Augustine treats as the whole pedagogy of the forty days and of the age of the Church after them: the bodily appearance is taken away so that faith may be built, and He who is no longer seen is still received.
He goes back the same hour. Et surgentes eadem hora regressi sunt in Ierusalem (Luke 24:33). They had walked seven miles; it is dark; they walk the seven miles back that night. They had left Jerusalem because everything was over. They return because it has begun.
The virtues, then, are not spectacular ones: truthful grief, docility under rebuke, hospitality to a stranger at nightfall, and the willingness to reverse a journey. It is a catalogue almost any Christian can attempt.
III. Apostolatus et Munus Ecclesiasticum
Cleopas is not an Apostle and no ancient source calls him one. The Eastern churches number him among the Seventy whom the Lord sent out two by two (Luke 10:1), and keep his memory in that company; this enrolment is synaxarial rather than documentary, and is Tier 3.
His office is nevertheless precise, and Luke states it in a single verse. Having returned to Jerusalem and found the Eleven and their company already saying surrexit Dominus vere, et apparuit Simoni, the two narrabant quæ gesta erant in via, et quomodo cognoverunt eum in fractione panis — “they told what things were done in the way, and how they knew Him in the breaking of bread” (Luke 24:35). Cleopas is a witness of the Resurrection, and reports it to the Apostles themselves. When St. Peter later fixes the qualification for filling the place of Judas, he names exactly this: one who had companied with them all the time the Lord went in and out among them, usque in diem qua assumptus est a nobis, testem resurrectionis eius nobiscum fieri unum ex istis (Acts 1:21-22). Cleopas answers the description. He was not chosen, and there is no sign that he sought to be.
He appears in no other scene of the New Testament. Whatever apostolate he exercised afterward is unrecorded.
If the identification with Clopas is allowed, a second and considerable office comes into view, not his own but his house’s: his wife stood at the Cross, and his son Symeon governed the church of Jerusalem after James and died a martyr’s death under Trajan. On that reading Cleopas belongs to the kinsmen of the Lord — the desposynoi — who held the mother church in the first generations, and his family furnishes one of the few genuine continuities between the household of Nazareth and the episcopate of Jerusalem. The reading is not certain. It is worth stating, and worth not overstating.
IV. Mors et Cultus
The death. The whole of what the Latin Church says of Cleopas’s end is contained in the Martyrology notice given at the head of this entry: that he was slain at Emmaus for the confession of the Lord, and buried with honour in the house where the Lord had supped with him.
The provenance matters. The notice is not primitive. It enters the Latin books through the ninth-century martyrologists — it stands in Ado of Vienne, passes into Usuard, and from Usuard into the Roman Martyrology of 1584 — and no earlier witness is known to report the martyrdom of Cleopas. The compiler himself flags it: ut traditur, “as is handed down,” the standard martyrological signal that the editor is transmitting a report and not vouching for it. The honest tier is Tier 3, and the Martyrology’s own reserve should be preserved rather than quietly dropped, as popular retellings tend to drop it. What can be said without hedging is that the Latin Church has for eleven centuries honoured Cleopas under the title of martyr, and that the tradition is unanimous as to place: he died where he had eaten.
The place. Emmaus itself is contested and has been since antiquity. Luke’s text gives sixty stadia from Jerusalem — about seven miles — though a significant manuscript tradition reads one hundred and sixty. The principal candidates are Amwas/Nicopolis, favoured by Eusebius in the Onomasticon and by St. Jerome after him, which suits the longer reading; el-Qubeibeh, at roughly the right distance for the shorter reading, taken up by the Franciscans from 1335, where a basilica stands over what is shown as the house of Cleophas; and Abu Ghosh, the Crusader Emmaus. The question is not settled and this entry does not settle it. The persistence of the dedication is itself the point: wherever the pilgrims went, they went looking for a house.
The cult. In the West, the commemoration is on the twenty-fifth of September, in the Martyrology, with no Mass and no office. In the Byzantine calendar he is kept on the thirtieth of October, and again on the fourth of January with the Synaxis of the Seventy; the Copts keep him in November. There is no ancient Latin church of his title in Rome, and no proper Mass in any calendar known to this entry.
But he is not liturgically absent. Luke 24:13-35 is the Gospel of Feria II infra Octavam Paschæ, Easter Monday, in the 1962 Missal as in the Roman books for many centuries before it. Cleopas is therefore named by the deacon in every Roman church on the second day of Easter, every year, in the highest octave of the calendar. Few saints with full formularies of their own are proclaimed so widely.
V. Documenta Spiritualia
He left no writings, and the tradition attributes none to him.
What he left is four sentences in the Gospel of St. Luke, and they are worth listing as a corpus, because each is a spiritual state named exactly:
- Tu solus peregrinus es in Ierusalem…? — the question of a man who does not yet know that the stranger beside him is the subject of his grief. The irony is total and it is not malicious; it is simply the condition of a soul that has the facts and not the light.
- Nos autem sperabamus… — hope in the past tense. The confession of a disappointed disciple, honestly made, in the hearing of the One disappointed in.
- Mane nobiscum, quoniam advesperascit. — the prayer of the evening of a life and of the evening of the world, and one of the few petitions in Scripture that a Christian may say without any adjustment whatever.
- Nonne cor nostrum ardens erat in nobis…? — the retrospective recognition that grace was at work in an hour when nothing seemed to be happening. Most of the spiritual life is verified this way, backward.
There is besides a structural gift, and it is the largest thing Cleopas gives the Church. The Emmaus road is built in two movements: the Scriptures opened on the way, and the bread broken at the table; and the disciples are brought from unbelief to recognition by both together, neither sufficing alone. That is the shape of the Mass — the Mass of the Catechumens and the Mass of the Faithful, the Word expounded and the Body received — and the Fathers saw it there from early on. When the Church wishes to show a Christian what happens to him on Sunday, she does not begin with a treatise. She sends him to walk with Cleopas.
VI. Oratio
There is no proper Collect. Saint Cleopas possesses no Mass in the 1962 Missale Romanum, no formulary in any proper calendar known to this entry, and consequently no oration that can be assigned to him as his own. Nothing below is to be represented as the Church’s prayer for his day.
Two liturgical texts already in the books stand nearest to him, and either may be used privately in his honour. Both are given here NON-AUTHENTICATED, pending collation against a printed 1962 Missal.
From the Mass of Easter Monday, on which his Gospel is read:
Deus, qui sollemnitate paschali, mundo remedia contulisti: populum tuum, quæsumus, cælesti dono prosequere; ut et perfectam libertatem consequi mereatur, et ad vitam proficiat sempiternam. Per Dominum.
“O God, who by the paschal solemnity hast bestowed remedies upon the world: follow Thy people, we beseech Thee, with Thy heavenly gift, that they may deserve to attain perfect freedom and to advance unto life everlasting. Through our Lord.”
Or, from the Common of a Martyr, should his martyrological title be followed:
Præsta, quæsumus, omnipotens Deus: ut, qui beati Cleophæ Martyris tui natalitia colimus, intercessione eius, in tui nominis amore roboremur.
“Grant, we beseech Thee, almighty God, that we who keep the birthday of blessed Cleophas Thy Martyr may, by his intercession, be strengthened in the love of Thy name.”
VII. Aspiratio
An original composition for this entry, not a liturgical text.
Domine Iesu, qui cum Cleopha tristi in via ambulasti, et Scripturas aperiens cor eius accendisti, et in fractione panis agnitus es: da nobis hospitium peregrino aperire, et te in pane latentem agnoscere; et mane nobiscum, quoniam advesperascit. Qui vivis et regnas in sæcula sæculorum. Amen.
“Lord Jesus, who didst walk in the way with sorrowing Cleopas, and opening the Scriptures didst set his heart afire, and wast known in the breaking of bread: grant us to open our lodging to the stranger, and to know Thee hidden in the bread; and stay with us, for it is towards evening. Who livest and reignest world without end. Amen.”
Practice
Examine. Where have I said sperabamus — “we were hoping” — of something God promised? Name the place where a hope of yours has quietly slipped into the past tense: a conversion long prayed for, a vocation, a healing, a marriage, a child. Cleopas said it out loud to Christ’s face, and was not struck down for it but instructed. Say it out loud in prayer today, plainly, rather than carrying it as a settled disappointment.
Do. Keep one stranger. Not metaphorically. The particular act for which the Church remembers Cleopas is that he made a man he did not know come inside at nightfall — the guest at the parish who knows no one, the relative nobody wants seated near them, the neighbour whose need is at an inconvenient hour. Gregory the Great’s rule governs the day: what is not understood in the hearing is understood in the doing.
Pray. Mane nobiscum, Domine, quoniam advesperascit. Say it at dusk, once, slowly. It will serve for the end of a day, the end of a labour, and the end of a life.
Devote. Attend the next Mass you hear as a walk to Emmaus: at the Epistle and Gospel, ask that the Scriptures be opened; at the Consecration and Communion, that the eyes be opened. If you carry a grief, add the First Glorious Mystery, and consider that the Resurrection was preached to the Apostles that evening by a man whose name is otherwise unknown to history.
VIII. Ad Ulteriorem Studium
Tier 1 — Primary witnesses
- Luke 24:13-35 (Vulgate, with Weber-Gryson for collation; Douay-Rheims for English). John 19:25. Acts 1:21-22 for the apostolic qualification.
- Roman Martyrology, xxv Septembris.
Tier 2 — Strongly attested tradition, patristic and liturgical
- Eusebius of Cæsarea, Historia Ecclesiastica III.11; III.32; IV.22 — the fragments of Hegesippus on Clopas, brother of Joseph, and on his son Symeon of Jerusalem.
- St. Gregory the Great, Homiliæ in Evangelia, Hom. XXIII (PL 76) — hospitality as the condition of recognition; the doing that illuminates the hearing.
- St. Augustine, sermons on the Emmaus appearance — the withdrawal of the visible presence and the building of faith.
- St. Bede, In Lucæ Evangelium expositio, lib. VI (CCSL 120) — the Latin transmission of the Cleopas/Clopas identification.
- Eusebius, Onomasticon, s.v. Emmaus, with St. Jerome’s Latin — the Nicopolis identification.
- Acta Sanctorum, Sept. VII, 5 sqq. — the Bollandist dossier.
Tier 3 — Traditio pia
- The identification of Luke’s Κλεοπάς with John’s Κλωπᾶς, and with it the whole kinship portrait: brother of St. Joseph, husband of Mary of Clopas, father of Symeon of Jerusalem.
- The martyrdom at Emmaus: Ado of Vienne, thence Usuard, thence the Roman Martyrology — transmitted ut traditur.
- The enrolment among the Seventy (Byzantine synaxarion; 30 October, and 4 January with the Synaxis of the Seventy).
- The naming of the unnamed companion: Nathanael (Epiphanius), Simon, and the Latin proposal of St. Luke himself.
Forward reading within the paths.
Sacred Liturgy — the Emmaus pericope as the native shape of the Mass: Word expounded, Bread broken, and the two joined. Read alongside the Easter Monday formulary and the Fathers on the fractio panis.
Theology and Doctrine — oculi eorum tenebantur: the manner of the risen Body, the conditions of its recognition, and why the visible presence is withdrawn at the instant of recognition. St. Thomas treats the appearances in the Tertia Pars on the Resurrection.
Lives of the Saints, with the East-West thread — the apostolic-generation figures who are richly developed in the Byzantine synaxarion and thin in the Roman books: Cleopas with Jason, Sosipater and Onesiphorus, and the question of the Seventy in the Latin calendar.
Church History — the desposynoi and the succession at Jerusalem: James the Just, Symeon son of Clopas, and the kinsmen of the Lord in the government of the mother church.
Sancte Cleopha, discipule Domini, qui eum in fractione panis agnovisti, ora pro nobis.