The Holy, Glorious and All-Praised Synaxis of the Seventy Apostles
1st century · The wider circle of disciples sent out by Christ
A common commemoration of the seventy disciples whom the Lord sent out two by two to proclaim the Gospel — the first laborers of the apostolic Church.
The Synaxis of the Holy Seventy Apostles is the common commemoration of the disciples whom Christ appointed and sent out ahead of Him, two by two, as recorded in the Gospel of Luke (10:1–24). Where the Twelve hold a unique place at the heart of the apostolic college, the Seventy — seventy-two in some manuscript traditions — formed a broader circle of missionary disciples who carried the Gospel through the apostolic age.
Scripture does not give their names, and the surviving lists come from later ecclesiastical tradition — above all the lists associated with Hippolytus of Rome and Dorotheus of Tyre, together with the Byzantine synaxaria — so that membership varies somewhat from one tradition to another. The Church commemorates them together on January 4, and many of them individually through the year.
Following the Resurrection and Pentecost, many of the Seventy became bishops, evangelists, founders of local churches, and martyrs, and tradition links them to mission across Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Rome, and North Africa. Among the best known are the Evangelists Luke and Mark, Barnabas, Timothy, Titus, Silas, Crispus, Sosthenes, Andronicus, Stachys, and Onesimus.
Their collective feast expresses the breadth of the apostolic mission — that the spread of the Gospel was the work not of a few leaders only but of many disciples laboring together — and many later bishoprics and local churches trace their origins to members of the Seventy.
The exact membership of the Seventy is nowhere given in Scripture; the names come from later lists, especially those attributed to Hippolytus of Rome and Dorotheus of Tyre, and from the Byzantine synaxaria. As a result, the rolls differ between traditions, and some figures appear on one list but not another.
The Seventy were among the earliest missionaries of the Church, and many became its first bishops in the great cities of the Mediterranean world. Their commemoration emphasizes the collaborative character of the apostolic age — the Gospel carried outward by a wide company of disciples — and the apostolic succession that flowed from their founding of local churches.