Theopedia

Priscilla and Aquila

Overview

Priscilla and Aquila were a first-century Jewish Christian married couple, tentmakers by trade, who worked alongside the Apostle Paul and hosted churches in their home in three different cities. Scripture names them together seven times, always as a pair, and in five of those seven Priscilla is named before her husband (Acts 18:2, 18, 26; Rom. 16:3-4; 1 Cor. 16:19; 2 Tim. 4:19). Paul calls them “my co-workers in Christ Jesus, who risked their own necks for my life” (Rom. 16:3-4).

Life and Ministry

Aquila was a Jew from Pontus in Asia Minor; his wife’s name, Priscilla, is a diminutive form of the more formal Prisca, by which Paul himself addresses her (Rom. 16:3; 2 Tim. 4:19).1 The couple had been living in Rome before Claudius expelled the Jewish community from the city, an edict datable to the emperor’s ninth regnal year, January AD 49 to January AD 50, on the combined testimony of Suetonius and Josephus.2 Acts 18:2 reports they had “recently” arrived in Corinth from Italy for exactly this reason.

In Corinth, Paul lodged and worked with them “because he was of the same trade” (Acts 18:2-3). The term “tentmaker” for a self-supporting minister comes directly from this passage: Paul, Priscilla, and Aquila supported themselves financially while simultaneously spreading the gospel in the city.3 When Paul left Corinth for Syria, the couple accompanied him as far as Ephesus and remained there while he continued his travels (Acts 18:18-19). It was in Ephesus that they heard Apollos, an eloquent Alexandrian Jew who “knew only the baptism of John,” preach boldly in the synagogue; they took him aside and “explained to him the way of God more accurately” (Acts 18:24-26). They were apparently still in Ephesus when Paul wrote 1 Corinthians, sending greetings from “the church that meets at their house” (1 Cor. 16:19).4

After Paul’s own departure from Ephesus, Priscilla and Aquila returned to Rome, where again a church met in their home (Rom. 16:3-5). By the time of 2 Timothy, written near the end of Paul’s life, they had moved back to Ephesus once more, and Paul asks Timothy to greet them there (2 Tim. 4:19).4

Ministry and Teaching

Priscilla and Aquila’s instruction of Apollos is the only biblical episode that shows the couple actively teaching, and it has drawn attention in discussions of how a wife’s teaching role relates to Paul’s own restriction in 1 Timothy 2:11-12. Jonathan Worthington, surveying who taught within Paul’s circles, includes the episode among his examples of teaching activity in the early church, while explicitly declining to resolve exactly what authorized it: “whether she was gifted by the Spirit like some in the church (1 Cor 14:6; Rom 12:6-8) or she simply took seriously her (and her husband’s) general Christian responsibility we do not know.”5 He goes on to note his own working assumption that the couple “would have carefully arranged how their biblical and theological training of Apollos … took place while maintaining gendered propriety,” consistent with Paul’s teaching in 1 Timothy, but he offers this as an assumption rather than something the text states outright.6 Elsewhere in the same discussion, Worthington counts Priscilla among those plausibly covered by Paul’s charge to entrust the gospel to “faithful people” who are “able to teach others also” (2 Tim. 2:2), though he calls this reading “likely, though not airtight.”7

Historical Significance

A minority of scholars, beginning with Adolph von Harnack in 1900, have proposed that Priscilla herself may have authored the anonymous Epistle to the Hebrews, reasoning from the letter’s rhetorical polish and the couple’s known role as teachers.8 Ruth Hoppin later developed the case at book length.9 The theory remains a minority position among scholars of Hebrews and has not been engaged directly in the sources consulted for this article beyond these two works; it is noted here as a matter of the couple’s later scholarly reception rather than as an established conclusion.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. J. Paul Tanner, A Chronology of the Apostle Paul, 4th ed. (September 23, 2010), 9. ↩

  2. Tanner, Chronology, 9 n.12, citing Jack Finegan and Suetonius, Life of Claudius 25: “Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome.” ↩

  3. Alexander Strauch, Biblical Eldership: Restoring the Eldership to Its Rightful Place in the Local Church, 4th ed. (Littleton, CO: Lewis and Roth Publishers, 2017), chap. 2, “Pastoral Leadership,” 34: “The term tentmakers comes from Acts 18:3. Paul, along with a couple named Aquila and Priscilla, supported themselves financially by tentmaking and simultaneously sharing the gospel in the city of Corinth.” ↩

  4. Tanner, Chronology, 10-11. ↩ ↩2

  5. Jonathan D. Worthington, “The Pastors and Teachers in Ephesians 4:11,” Themelios 50, no. 3 (2025): 508. ↩

  6. Worthington, “Pastors and Teachers,” 508. ↩

  7. Worthington, “Pastors and Teachers,” 510 n.57. ↩

  8. Adolph von Harnack, “Probabilia uber die Addresse und den Verfasser des Hebraerbriefes,” Zeitschrift fur die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und die Kunde der aelteren Kirche 1 (1900): 16-41, English translation in Lee Anna Starr, The Bible Status of Woman (Zarephath, NJ: Pillar of Fire, 1955), 392-415. Not library-held. ↩

  9. Ruth Hoppin, Priscilla’s Letter: Finding the Author of the Epistle to the Hebrews (Fort Bragg, CA: Lost Coast Press, 2000). Not library-held. ↩