AQUILA (uh QUILL uh)

Akylas, Greek

“egale”

First century AD

First mention: Acts 18:2

Aquila and his wife, Priscilla, may have been church leaders in Rome before Claudius Caesar ordered them out-of-town. In AD 49, Caesar ordered all Jews to leave, perhaps because of violent clashes between tradition-minded Jews and those who believed that Jesus-crucified some twenty years earlier was the Messiah.

The couple moved to neighboring Greece and set up their tent-making business in Corinth. There they met the apostle Paul, a fellow tent maker who worked with them to support himself while he started the Corinthian church. The couple later went with Paul to Ephesus in Turkey and taught the traveling minister Apollos about the Christian faith. They eventually returned to Rome about a year after Claudius died in AD 54. They were the first people Paul greeted in his New Testament letter to believers in Rome.