The Seventy whom Christ sent out two by two (Luke 10), commemorated together as a synaxis alongside their individual feasts.
The Synaxis of the Holy Seventy Apostles is the common commemoration of the wider circle of 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 body 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 those associated with Hippolytus of Rome and Dorotheus of Tyre, together with the Byzantine synaxaria — so that the 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; tradition links them to mission across Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Rome, and North Africa. 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 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.