St. Prochorus, Deacon and Bishop
Scribe on Patmos
From the Acts of the Apostles and the tradition of the Seven
One of the Seven
Editor's note
When a complaint arose in the early Jerusalem community that the widows of the Greek-speaking Jews were being overlooked in the daily distribution of food, the Twelve called the disciples together and asked them to choose seven men full of the Holy Ghost and of wisdom, that the apostles might give themselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word. The Seven were the first deacons of the Church, and the order of the diaconate that runs through every Orthodox Liturgy to this day takes its beginning from them.
Acts 6:5 (KJV)
ScriptureVerbatim Scripture.
And the saying pleased the whole multitude: and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Ghost, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolas a proselyte of Antioch:
With John on Patmos
Editor's note
The later Greek tradition holds that Prochorus, after the dispersion of the Seven, attached himself to the Apostle John and travelled with him through the years of his missionary labor in Asia. When John was exiled by the emperor Domitian to the island of Patmos around the year ninety-five, Prochorus, according to the synaxarion, went with him into exile, served him in his old age, and wrote at his dictation. The tradition assigns to him in particular the role of scribe for the Fourth Gospel, which the apostle is said to have dictated to him on the island after the visions of the Apocalypse had been given.
Whether the tradition reflects a historical memory or a later piety, the figure it preserves is a beautiful one: the elder apostle and the younger deacon, the seer and the scribe, the eye that had been on the breast of the Lord and the hand that wrote down the words for every later age. The Fourth Gospel, the synaxarion says, was given to the Church in the cave where the visions were received, John speaking and Prochorus writing, until the words on which the whole later theology of the Word would rest were committed to the page.
After John's release and return to Ephesus, Prochorus, the tradition continues, was made bishop of Nicomedia in Bithynia. There he laboured for the rest of his life and at last died a martyr's death, around the end of the first century. The Church keeps his memory on the twenty-eighth of July with the rest of the Seven.