St. Prochorus, Deacon and Bishop

Prochorus is named in the sixth chapter of Acts as one of the Seven set apart by the apostles to serve the tables of the daily distribution at Jerusalem, the first deacons of the Church. He was, with the rest of the Seven, 'a man of good report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom.'

After the martyrdom of Stephen and the scattering of the Seven, the later Greek tradition relates that Prochorus attached himself to the Apostle John, travelled with him through his missionary labors in Asia, and accompanied him into exile when the emperor Domitian banished him to the island of Patmos around the year ninety-five.

On Patmos, the synaxarion holds, after the visions of the Apocalypse had been given to John, the apostle dictated to Prochorus the Fourth Gospel, that the Church might have in writing the words on which the whole later theology of the Word would rest. The iconography of John the Theologian in the cave on Patmos almost always shows Prochorus seated at his feet, pen in hand, writing on a scroll.

After John's release and return to Ephesus, Prochorus was consecrated bishop of Nicomedia in Bithynia. There he labored to the end of his life, and at last died a martyr's death for the Faith around the close of the first century. His memory is kept on the twenty-eighth of July with the rest of the Seven Deacons.