Apostolic Age (1st century)
Feast: July 8
A tentmaker, teacher, and church planter who corrected a famous preacher’s theology — and Paul listed her name before her husband’s.
Priscilla and her husband Aquila show up six times in the New Testament, and in four of those six mentions, Priscilla’s name comes first. In a patriarchal culture, that detail screams. She was the more prominent of the two. They were Jewish tentmakers, expelled from Rome when Emperor Claudius kicked out the Jews around AD 49. They landed in Corinth, where Paul moved in with them and worked the same trade. The three of them cut leather and stitched tents by day and built the Church by night. When the eloquent preacher Apollos arrived in Ephesus, Priscilla and Aquila noticed his theology was incomplete. They didn’t embarrass him publicly. They ‘took him aside and explained to him the way of God more accurately.’ A married couple quietly correcting a traveling celebrity preacher — the scene is almost funny. Paul called them ‘my co-workers in Christ Jesus’ and said they had ‘risked their necks’ for him. Their house in Rome served as a church. Priscilla was a lay theologian, a businesswoman, and a host. She never held a title in the formal sense, but the early Church remembered her name — before her husband’s — because she earned it.