The tentmaking couple who taught Apollos and hosted the Roman church
Priscilla and Aquila are the most prominent married couple in the New Testament after Mary and Joseph. They are named together six times across Acts and the Pauline letters (Acts 18:2, 18:18, 18:26; Romans 16:3; 1 Corinthians 16:19; 2 Timothy 4:19). In four of those six the wife is named first — *Priscilla and Aquila* — which is unusual enough in first-century Greek convention that the patristic and modern commentators have read it as a deliberate signal: she is at least as load-bearing in the ministry as he is.
They enter the Acts narrative as refugees. Claudius, the Roman emperor, had expelled the Jews from Rome around 49 AD — the Roman historian Suetonius records the expulsion as due to disturbances *impulsore Chresto*, "at the instigation of Chrestus." Most modern historians read this as Suetonius garbling the name *Christus* — Christ. The disturbances were the riots between Jewish believers in Christ and Jews who rejected the messianic claim. Claudius, uninterested in the theological distinction, expelled the whole Jewish community. Aquila — a Jewish man from Pontus on the southern shore of the Black Sea — and his wife Priscilla left Rome and went to Corinth.
Paul meets them there at the beginning of his second missionary journey. Acts 18:2–3 records the meeting in a single sentence and adds the detail that has occupied Christian imagination for two thousand years: *Because he was of the same trade he stayed with them and worked, for they were tentmakers by trade.* The Greek word *skēnopoios* covers leather-working broadly — making tents, sails, awnings, harnesses. It was a trade with which a competent craftsman could earn his keep in any Mediterranean port. Paul earned his living this way alongside Priscilla and Aquila for the year and a half he spent in Corinth.
The arrangement is theologically significant. Paul refused to take support from the Corinthian church (1 Corinthians 9:12–18) so that no one could accuse him of preaching for money. He earned his living with his hands. The hands he earned it with worked alongside the hands of a woman named Priscilla. The first-century reader would not have missed this. A Jewish-Christian married couple ran a tentmaking shop in Corinth and the apostle to the Gentiles was the third employee.
When Paul leaves Corinth for Ephesus he takes Priscilla and Aquila with him. They stay in Ephesus when Paul goes on. While they are there a man named Apollos arrives — *a native of Alexandria, an eloquent man, competent in the Scriptures* (Acts 18:24). Apollos has been *instructed in the way of the Lord*, but he knows only the baptism of John the Baptist. The full Christian gospel — Pentecost, the gift of the Spirit, the meaning of Christ's death and resurrection — is not yet in his teaching. He preaches what he knows boldly in the synagogue.
*When Priscilla and Aquila heard him, they took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately.* (Acts 18:26) Priscilla is named first. The couple takes the brilliant Alexandrian preacher into private instruction, in their own house, and finishes his theological formation. Apollos will go on from Ephesus to Corinth and become one of the great figures of the early church — Paul will refer to him in 1 Corinthians as a leader some of the Corinthian church preferred to Paul himself. The man whose preaching divided Corinth was instructed by a tentmaking couple in their living room.
The Christian tradition has held this scene as the canonical example of lay catechesis — instruction in the faith done in a private home by trained believers who are not themselves apostles. The Reformation read it as the scriptural warrant for the priesthood of all believers. The contemporary Christian conversation about the teaching role of women has come back to it repeatedly. Paul knew Priscilla and Aquila well. He had worked beside them. He saw them teach Apollos. He wrote no objection to the arrangement. He praised them in the letters.
The couple eventually returned to Rome — Claudius died in 54 AD and his successor Nero rescinded the expulsion. Paul writes to the Roman church around 57 AD: *Greet Prisca and Aquila, my fellow workers in Christ Jesus, who risked their necks for my life, to whom not only I give thanks but all the churches of the Gentiles give thanks as well. Greet also the church in their house.* (Romans 16:3–5) Three details land in three short clauses. *Fellow workers* — the Greek *synergoi*, the same word Paul uses for Timothy and Titus and the other apostolic colleagues. *Risked their necks for my life* — a specific incident the New Testament does not narrate but Paul names anyway, leaving the reader with the impression that at some point in Ephesus or Corinth they intervened physically to save him. *The church in their house* — their house in Rome is one of the early Christian house-churches, with a congregation meeting there.
They are mentioned again in 1 Corinthians 16:19 — they have moved back to Ephesus by then, and they have *a church in their house* there too. The verb is precise. They host two house churches across two cities. The Christian tradition has held them as the patrons of every Christian married couple whose home becomes a place of teaching and hospitality.
Paul's last reference to them, in his last letter, is the warmest. *Greet Prisca and Aquila* (2 Timothy 4:19). The same names, the same word order, decades after the first meeting in Corinth. Whatever they had built with him outlasted the political upheavals of three reigns and the prison sentences Paul did and the persecutions they all lived through.
The extracanonical traditions about their deaths are thin and should be flagged. The traditional Roman martyrology places their martyrdom under Nero around 64 AD. The historical evidence is later patristic memory, not first-century record. What is firsthand is the canonical record: a Jewish-Christian married couple who ran a tentmaking shop, hosted the apostle Paul as their third employee, taught the most brilliant Alexandrian preacher of the period in their living room, and ran the church in their house in two cities across at least a decade.
Related entries: Corinth, Paul (Saul of Tarsus), Lydia of Thyatira