Ecumenical Commemoration
Women of the Apostolic Church
January 27
also known as Lydia of Thyatira, Tabitha, Phoebe of Cenchreae
Lydia, Dorcas, and Phoebe are three first-century women whose stories never touch. Lydia of Thyatira dealt in purple cloth at Philippi, heard Paul preach at a riverside place of prayer, was baptized with her household, and gave the mission its house. Dorcas of Joppa made coats and garments for the widows of her city, died, and was raised by Peter. Phoebe of Cenchreae is commended by Paul as a deacon of her church and a benefactor to many. The Anglican Church in North America commemorates the three together on January 27 as Helpers of the Apostles.
Lydia of Thyatira sold purple, which was the costly colour, the colour of officials and of money. She had come a long way from home to Philippi, in Macedonia, and on the sabbath she went out through the city gate to a place by a river where women gathered to pray. There was no synagogue there for her to sit in. She was a Gentile who worshipped the God of Israel from the edge of things, and the edge of things was where she prayed.
That morning strangers came down to the river and sat with the women and began to speak. One of them was Paul. Luke, who wrote the account, says of Lydia only this: her heart the Lord opened. Not that she reasoned her way in, not that she was persuaded, but that a door she could not have opened herself was opened. She was baptized, and her household with her, and then she did the boldest thing in the whole scene. She put her own standing in the strangers' hands. "If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord," she said, "come into my house, and abide there." And when they hesitated, she would not let them go. Luke's word is that she constrained them.
It cost her. Within days Paul and Silas were dragged into the market place, beaten with rods, and locked in the inner prison, and everyone in Philippi knew whose guests they had been. When they came out, the very first place they went was back to Lydia's house, and the brethren were already there waiting. Between the day of her baptism and the day of that homecoming, her house had quietly become the church.
Far to the south, in the port town of Joppa, a woman named Tabitha sewed. Her name meant gazelle in Aramaic, and the Greeks in that mixed harbour town called her Dorcas, which means the same thing. She was a disciple, and she was known for one plain thing: she made clothes for the widows, who in that world had nobody to make anything for them. Then she fell sick and died. They washed her body and carried it up to an upper room, and the widows stood around it and wept, and they had nothing to hold up but the coats and garments she had made them. That is what they showed Peter when he came over from Lydda, two men having gone to fetch him: her work, held up in their hands.
Peter put them all out of the room. He knelt down and prayed. Then he turned to the body and said, "Tabitha, arise." She opened her eyes, and she saw him, and she sat up. He gave her his hand and lifted her up and called the widows back in and gave her to them alive. The chapter does not end in astonishment. It ends by saying that it became known through all Joppa, and many believed in the Lord.
The third woman we know from two sentences, and they are Paul's own. Phoebe belonged to the church at Cenchreae, the eastern harbour of Corinth. Paul calls her a deacon of that church, and he calls her a patron who had helped many people and had helped him. Then he asks the Christians at Rome, who have never met him and have never met her, to receive her and to give her whatever she needs. Almost everyone who has read the letter since has drawn the same conclusion about why he wrote that: Phoebe was carrying it. The greatest letter in the world went to Rome in the hands of a woman nobody in Rome knew, on nothing but Paul's word that she was worth trusting.
None of these three women ever met. They shared no city and no decade. What they shared was a house, a needle, and a journey, offered to God without waiting to be asked, and what came of that offering outlived every one of them.
You will notice that not one of these women is remembered for saying anything remarkable. Lydia speaks once in all of Scripture, and what she says is an invitation. Dorcas never speaks at all; what survives of her is a handful of garments held up by weeping women who had nothing else of hers to hold. Phoebe is known to us only because Paul asked strangers to trust her with a need he did not specify. Between them they gave a room, a skill, and a journey, and none of the three seems to have known what any of it would come to. You may have less to offer than you think you need, and you may never see what it becomes. What is in your hands this week that you have been waiting to have a better reason to give?
Everything certainly known about these three women comes from three short passages: Acts 9:36-42 for Dorcas, Acts 16:11-15 and 16:40 for Lydia, and Romans 16:1-2 for Phoebe. The quotations on this page are from the Douay-Rheims, in the Challoner revision. Beyond those passages the record simply stops. No birth, no death, no parents, no husband or children, no later office, and no year for anything. The dates usually given (Dorcas around AD 33 to 35, Lydia around AD 49 to 50, Phoebe around AD 56 to 58) are reconstructions of Peter's and Paul's careers, not data from the sources.
The three passages are not of equal weight as evidence. Romans is Paul's own hand and is the closest to its subject of anything here, though it is a letter of commendation rather than a report, and it supplies no biography at all. The Lydia passage falls inside one of the "we" sections of Acts, where the narrator writes as a participant, which is the strongest claim to eyewitness presence in the whole file; how much historical weight those sections carry has been debated in modern scholarship. The Dorcas passage stands furthest off. Acts is conventionally dated somewhere between AD 62 and 90, and this episode precedes any Pauline-circle presence, so at best it is a written source within a generation drawing on earlier Petrine tradition. There is no independent first-century corroboration of any of the three.
Two facts about the women's names are worth stating because the texts themselves state them. Acts glosses Tabitha and Dorcas as the same name in two languages, Aramaic and Greek, which fits a mixed port. And Paul calls Phoebe diakonos of her church, a word whose force has been argued over ever since. Origen, writing about AD 246 in a Greek commentary now lost and surviving only in Rufinus's Latin translation of about 405, gives the earliest surviving argument that the word names an instituted office. John Chrysostom, preaching at Antioch late in the fourth century, reads it the same way: "he has added her rank, by mentioning her being deaconess," where the English translators printed the alternative rendering "servant" in brackets beside it. Against that ancient office-reading stands a real ambiguity, acknowledged from an unexpected quarter: the Catholic Encyclopedia's own article on deaconesses allows that the phrase may mean only that she was in the ministry, that is the service, of the church, without implying official status. The modern dispute over what the word licenses is live and unresolved, and this page reports it rather than settling it.
Chrysostom is the earliest surviving commentator on two of the three. On Lydia he set the scene beside Peter's lodging in Joppa and asked his congregation a question: "Peter abides with a tanner: (Paul) with a woman who was a seller of purple, and a foreigner. Where is pride?" On Dorcas he did philology from the pulpit, noticing that her Greek name means a gazelle, and remarking "as active and wakeful was she as an antelope."
Of the three, Dorcas alone has a place on the map. A pilgrim from Piacenza, travelling about 570, was shown her tomb at Joppa. By the time of Willibald's journey in the 720s there was a Church of St Peter the Apostle standing at the site of the raising, and by Sæwulf's visit in 1102 there were two churches near Jaffa to tell apart. In 1114 the Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem granted St Peter's church and its cemetery to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Travellers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries noted that the site shown as her house had moved outside the shrunken walls. Unusually for so old a memory, no translation of relics was ever claimed; the tradition holds instead that she stayed where she was buried. A Russian Orthodox church of St Peter and St Tabitha stands over a rock-cut chamber there today, and pilgrims still come.
Her name also travelled without her body. Basil of Caesarea held her up as the pattern for a widow's working life. Charitable sewing societies took her name from Salem, Massachusetts in 1811 onward, including one founded in New York in 1828 to clothe the children of the African Free Schools, and the pattern is still reproducing.
Lydia is remembered where she was baptized. A stream outside Philippi is identified with the river of Acts 16, and a modern baptistery built in the manner of the ancient basilicas marks it. There is no relic and no tomb. Her patronage is of dyers and workers in colour, which is simply her trade.
Phoebe has no tomb, no relic, and no shrine of any kind, and her whole afterlife has been argument and namesake. In 1903 a group of Reformed ministers and laymen in Allentown, Pennsylvania founded the Phoebe Deaconess Home to train women for the care of the sick and the destitute on her model. The order they trained for faded; the ministry they founded is still caring for the aged.
Acts of the Apostles 16:13-15 and 16:40, and Acts 9:36-42, quoted in the Douay-Rheims Bible, Challoner revision (1749-1752), from the Douay-Rheims Bible Online: Acts 9 at https://www.drbo.org/chapter/51009.htm and Acts 16 at https://www.drbo.org/chapter/51016.htm. The words "If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come into my house, and abide there" are Lydia's at Acts 16:15; "Tabitha, arise" is Peter's at Acts 9:40, and no word of Dorcas survives in any source.
Epistle to the Romans 16:1-2, same edition, at https://www.drbo.org/chapter/52016.htm. The Douay-Rheims renders the disputed term as "who is in the ministry of the church"; the King James Version gives "servant" and the New Revised Standard Version (1989) gives "deacon."
John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Homily 35, at the comment on Acts 16:13-14 (Lydia, and the tanner and the purple-seller), and Homily 21, at the comment on Acts 9:36-42 (Dorcas, and the gazelle), translated by J. Walker, J. Sheppard, and H. Browne, revised by George B. Stevens, in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, volume 11 (1889): https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/210135.htm and https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/210121.htm.
John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistle to the Romans, Homily 30, at the comment on Romans 16:1-2 (Phoebe's rank), same translation and series: https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/210230.htm. The bracketed alternative "(A.V. servant)" is the translators' own.
The Catholic Encyclopedia, article "Deaconesses" (1908), on the ambiguity of the term at Romans 16:1: https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/04651a.htm.
Origen, Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans 10.17, surviving only in Rufinus's Latin translation of about 405; the Greek of about 246 is lost. Critical edition of the Latin: Caroline P. Hammond Bammel, Der Römerbriefkommentar des Origenes: Kritische Ausgabe der Übersetzung Rufins, Vetus Latina / Aus der Geschichte der lateinischen Bibel 16, 33, 34 (Freiburg: Herder, 1990-1998). No wording of this passage is quoted on this page.
Palestine Exploration Fund Quarterly Statement for 1894, "Tabitha's Tomb and St. Peter's Church at Jaffa," digesting the Piacenza Pilgrim, Willibald, Sæwulf, and the charter of 1114: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Palestine_Exploration_Fund_-_Quarterly_Statement_for_1894/Tabitha%E2%80%99s_Tomb_and_St._Peter%E2%80%99s_Church_at_Jaffa.
The Anglican Church in North America, Book of Common Prayer 2019, Calendar of the Christian Year, January 27, Optional Commemorations (Ecumenical), p. 691, for the wording "Lydia, Dorcas, and Phoebe, Helpers of the Apostles."
Almighty God, you have surrounded us with a great cloud of witnesses: Grant that we, encouraged by the good example of your servants Lydia, Dorcas, and Phoebe, may persevere in running the race that is set before us, until at last, with them, we attain to your eternal joy; through Jesus Christ, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
The date is modern, and honesty requires saying so. No ancient source groups these three women. Each has an older single commemoration in the East (Lydia on May 20, Tabitha on October 25, Phoebe on September 3), and the Ecumenical Patriarchate formally glorified Lydia only on May 23, 1972, giving her the title Equal to the Apostles. The joint feast belongs to the twentieth-century Western calendars: January 27 in the Lutheran Book of Worship lineage carried into ELCA and NALC practice, and in the Anglican Church in North America's 2019 Book of Common Prayer, whose kalendar for January 27 lists the optional ecumenical commemoration "Lydia, Dorcas, and Phoebe, Helpers of the Apostles." The Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod keeps the same three on October 25 instead. The Episcopal Church has no joint commemoration at all, keeping Lydia on May 21 and adding Dorcas alone on October 25 in 2022. The individual memories are ancient; the grouping is curated, and it is curated around what the three did rather than around how any of them died.
Readings for a Commemoration
Micah 6:6–8Psalm 11 Corinthians 1:18–31John 3:16–21