The Alexandrian Gospel of Mark's "Naked/Dead Youth" was Paul

Date	Source	Evidence that 30 June marks Paul’s death	Detail	Notes
c. 750 (compilation; material 7th c.)	Gelasian Sacramentary	Earliest MSS give three Masses for SS Peter & Paul on 29 June; in some witnesses the third, “the proper Mass of St Paul,” is assigned to 30 June.	Shows that by the late 7th–8th c. Roman usage was already separating Paul’s liturgical commemoration from the joint solemnity of 29 June by giving him his own formulary on the following day.	Implies a distinct “Paul day” adjunct to the joint solemnity; while not explicitly calling it his dies natalis, it provides the earliest liturgical footing for a 30 June Pauline observance at Rome.
8th–9th c. (as preserved in PL 78)	Liber sacramentorum (PL 78)	Lists «III Kal. Iulii – natalis Petri et Pauli» (29 June) and «Pridie Kal. Iulii – natalis Sancti Pauli» (30 June).	In late antique and medieval Latin liturgical usage natalis = “heavenly birthday,” i.e. martyrdom / day of death. Here 29 June is the joint natalis of Peter and Paul; 30 June is explicitly the natalis of Paul alone.	This is the clearest early Roman witness that 30 June is treated as Paul’s own dies natalis distinct from the shared 29 June feast.
late 8th–9th c.	Gregorian Sacramentary	Assigns the solemnity of St Peter to 29 June and a distinct observance of St Paul to 30 June, each with its own Mass.	While each Mass continues to mention the other Apostle, the calendar and propers clearly split the days: Peter primarily on 29 June, Paul primarily on 30 June.	Confirms that the Roman sacramentary tradition stabilises a two-day Petrine–Pauline complex with 30 June reserved especially for Paul.
c. 989–995	Ælfric of Eynsham, Anglo-Saxon Homiliary	One homily is headed «Pridie Kalendas Iulii – Natale Sancti Pauli Apostoli».	Ælfric follows Roman usage: “Natale Sancti Pauli” on Pridie Kal. Iulii = 30 June, and “natale” in his homiliary context refers to the martyr’s death-day.	Shows the Roman 30 June Pauline natale had been transmitted into Anglo-Saxon liturgical preaching by the late 10th c.
c. 1130s	Benedict of St Peter’s (canon of the Vatican)	Describes papal custom: after the 29 June solemnity at St Peter’s, the pope goes to St Paul’s tomb on 30 June for Vespers in Paul’s honour.	The narrative presupposes a fixed Roman praxis in which Peter is primarily celebrated on 29 June at the Vatican basilica, and Paul receives his own liturgical attention at the Ostian basilica on the following day.	Medieval Roman ceremonial evidence matching the sacramentaries: Peter 29 June, Paul 30 June, with 30 June linked concretely to his tomb and martyrdom site.
mid-12th c. (†1165)	Godefridus Admontensis, Opera omnia (p. 905)	Under Pridie Kal. Iulii (30 June) he gives the rubric «Commemorationis S. Pauli Apostoli prima».	The heading presumes a liturgical commemoration of Paul on 30 June; in medieval homiletic/liturgical Latin such a commemoration is rooted in the belief that this is the day of his passion.	Aligns monastic homiletic tradition with Roman sacramentary practice: 30 June is the primary commemoration of Paul the Apostle.
High Middle Ages → 20th c. (retained in 1962)	Roman Vespers antiphon for 30 June	The antiphon for 30 June speaks of Paul, who “on this day” inclined his head and was crowned with martyrdom.	The Office text explicitly links the de-capitation and martyr’s crown to “this day” (hodie), i.e. 30 June, not merely to a generic commemoration of Paul.	This antiphon survives into the 1962 Roman calendar’s “Commemoration of St Paul,” giving a direct liturgical statement that 30 June is the day of Paul’s beheading on the Ostian Way.
19th c. (1840s–1860s)	Dom Prosper Guéranger, The Liturgical Year	Presents 30 June as the “Commemoration of St Paul,” explicitly recalling his beheading on the Ostian Way on this date.	Guéranger summarises older Roman tradition for a popular readership, explaining that the Church devotes the day after the joint feast to the separate memory of Paul’s martyrdom.	A modern but tradition-minded synthesis that confirms how 30 June was received in 19th-c. Roman Catholic liturgical theology: the specific day of Paul’s death and beheading.

Source & passage	Date of source	What it says about timing	Any month/day given?	Any year / regnal marker?	Notes
Dionysius of Corinth, letter to the Romans (preserved by Eusebius, HE 2.25.8)	c. 170 (via 4th-c. Eusebius)	“Peter and Paul … suffered at the same time” (κατὰ τὸν αὐτὸν καιρόν).	None.	Under Nero (implied by the surrounding context in HE 2.25).	Strongest early witness for a “same time / same season” martyrdom, but not necessarily the same calendar day.
Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 2.25 (esp. 2.25.5, 8)	c. 311–324	Treats their martyrdoms as occurring about the same time under Nero; quotes Dionysius for the “same time” formulation.	None.	Under Nero.	Eusebius reinforces simultaneity in a loose/seasonal sense; he does not claim an identical calendar date for Peter and Paul.
Augustine, Sermon 295 (for the feast of the Apostles)	early 5th c.	Explicitly acknowledges that Peter and Paul suffered on different days, but explains that the Church celebrates one common feast for them.	Liturgical focus is on 29 June in Rome as the joint feast of Peter and Paul.	None.	Shows a tradition that knows the martyrdom days differed historically, while liturgically uniting them on a single solemnity.
Jerome, De viris illustribus (on Peter: ch. 1/5; on Paul: ch. 12)	392–393	Gives the later influential precision that Paul died “on the same day as Peter” and on the Ostian Way.	No specific calendar day in the text itself; later Roman liturgy settles on 29 June as their shared feast.	“In the 14th year of Nero.”	Jerome tightens the older “same time” language into “same day” and anchors it in a near-contemporary regnal marker (Nero’s 14th year, c. 67–68).

Date (approx.)	Source (Latin)	Evidence that 30 June marks Paul’s death	Notes/Citations
late 7th – 8th c.	Gelasian Sacramentary	In early copies this sacramentary gives three Masses for SS Peter & Paul on 29 June; in some manuscripts the third, described as “the proper Mass of St Paul,” is reassigned to 30 June, effectively singling out that day for Paul.	Gregory DiPippo notes that certain Gelasian manuscripts move Paul’s Mass to 30 June, indicating the emerging separation of his commemoration and pointing to 30 June as his distinct dies natalis.
8th–9th c.	Liber sacramentorum (PL 78)	Lists “III Kalendas Iulii – natalis Petri et Pauli” (29 June) and immediately after “Pridie Kalendas Iulii – natalis Sancti Pauli” (30 June), marking 30 June as Paul’s own natalis (heavenly birthday = day of death).	The Wikisource/PL text of the Liber sacramentorum shows the sequential entries for June 29 (joint feast) and June 30 (Paul alone), making 30 June Paul’s martyr-day in this Roman sacramentary tradition.
8th–9th c.	Gregorian Sacramentary	Explicitly assigns Peter to 29 June and Paul to 30 June as distinct liturgical observances, while each Mass still commemorates the other Apostle.	DiPippo notes that the Gregorian Sacramentary, compiled about a century after the Gelasian, stabilizes the two-day pattern and confirms 30 June as the proper day for Paul’s commemoration.
c. 860–875	Adon of Vienne / Usuardus (Latin martyrology tradition)	The entry for Pridie Kalendas Iulii reads: “Commemoratio sancti Pauli apostoli, quem cum beato Petro cruce appenso coelum gladio necatum excepit…”, a clear and separate commemoration of St Paul on 30 June.	The 9th-century martyrology as transmitted by Usuard includes this notice under June 30, emphasizing Paul’s distinct dies natalis one day after the joint solemnity of the two Apostles.
11th–12th c.	Ordines Romani / canon Benedict of St Peter’s	In describing Roman custom, Benedict notes that after celebrating Peter’s feast at St Peter’s on 29 June, the pope processes and “sings Vespers at the tomb of St Paul on the Ostian Way” on 30 June.	This Roman ordo shows liturgical practice conforming to the calendar: a papal procession and Office at Paul’s basilica on the day after the double feast, reinforcing 30 June as Paul’s own day.
12th c.	Godefridus Admontensis, Homiliae festales (Libri omniarum) p. 905	A homiliary heading reads “FESTUS COMMEMORATIONIS S. PAULI APOSTOLI PRIMA” under the section for Pridie Kalendas Iulii, explicitly treating June 30 as the first (principal) commemoration of St Paul.	Google-Books page 905 shows the rubric “Festus commemorationis S. Pauli Apostoli prima” attached to June 30, providing medieval homiletic/liturgical confirmation of Paul’s commemoration on that date.
High Middle Ages → 20th c.	Roman Vespers antiphon (Commemoration of St Paul)	The Magnificat antiphon for 30 June proclaims that “on this day” Paul inclined his head for the name of Christ and was crowned with martyrdom, explicitly locating the martyrdom on that date.	DiPippo cites this antiphon in his discussion of the Roman Office; its “hoc die” language directly identifies 30 June as the day of Paul’s beheading on the Ostian Way.
mid-19th c.	Dom Prosper Guéranger, The Liturgical Year	In his chapter for 30 June (“Commemoration of St Paul”), Guéranger recounts Paul’s beheading along the Ostian Way and treats this date as his dies natalis, distinct from the shared feast of 29 June.	Although a modern synthesis, Guéranger is consciously preserving the Roman tradition that had long identified 30 June as Paul’s martyr-day, drawing on the medieval sacramentaries, martyrologies, and Ordines listed above.

The more I work through the feast days for Peter and Paul, the more I’m convinced the calendar is hiding an older story – and that story points straight back to the youth of Secret Mark looking suspiciously like Paul.

Start with the obvious weirdness. Christianity supposedly begins in Palestine. Jesus never goes to Rome. Yet somehow we emerge from history with Rome as the center of the Christian universe and a liturgical year that orbits around Petrine symbolism planted in that city. That centering isn’t a natural outcome of the texts as they stand; it’s the result of a very specific editorial and liturgical project.

The version of Christian history that makes Rome central depends on a particular configuration of books: Acts plus a domesticated Pauline collection. Acts hands you a neat arc in which Paul ends his journey in Rome; the Roman church then gets to call itself the terminus of the apostolic itinerary and, by extension, the center of gravity for everyone else. But Marcionite sources – and all the hostile testimony to them – preserve the memory of an earlier configuration where Acts was rejected and Paul’s writings were not the property of a Lukan-Roman master narrative at all. For them, the Pauline corpus and the gospel stood together against the emerging “catholic” fusion of Luke, Acts, and episcopal succession lists. They explicitly called Acts a forgery.

So when we talk about Rome’s centrality, we’re not talking about “what really happened” in the first generation; we’re talking about the success of one storyline over others. Call that “fascism” if you like – not in the 1930s sense but in the older monarchian sense: one rule, one story, one center, imposed retroactively on a messier, more plural past.

This is where Peter comes in. The Roman church eventually imagines Peter enthroned in Rome, sitting alone as the visible head of the entire Christian world. No one ever saw that happen, of course. It’s an eschatological-hierarchical fantasy built out of a few lines about “you are Peter” and a lot of later imagination. What’s odd is that in the Marcionite (and broader eastern) imagination, the figure sitting on the “throne” is not Peter at all, but Paul. Origen’s Homilies on Luke preserve a glimpse of that other world: in Marcionite circles, Paul is enthroned at the right hand of God, with another figure (Origen says “Marcion”) at the left. The Mark 10:35–45 scene where James and John want to sit “at your right and at your left in your glory” is suddenly very relevant: in one stream of reception, those seats are occupied by members of the Jerusalem inner circle; in another, Paul has taken the right-hand throne.

So we already have two rival imaginations of who occupies the symbolic place of honor: Petrine in Roman catholicism, Pauline in Marcionite circles. If there was ever a moment when Paul, not Peter, defined the liturgical and symbolic center of the Christian year, we should expect that to leave a faint trace somewhere.

Now look at the calendar.

In the Roman system we inherit, June 29 is the joint feast of “Peter and Paul.” That’s the big one. Processions, basilicas, poems, the whole city out on pilgrimage to the Vatican and the Ostian Way. By late antiquity you get Prudentius painting the scene: the “day of two festivals,” Peter’s crucifixion at the Vatican, Paul’s beheading on the Ostian road, one bifestum that binds the two apostles into a single Roman memory. Later theologians like Jerome tighten the screws and start talking as if they literally died on the same day.

But when you press into the evidence, June 29 looks less like a historical martyrdom date and more like a piece of Roman civic appropriation. The old Roman calendar had a festival of Romulus on that day – a civic feast for the mythical founder of the city. At some point, Christians in Rome take over that slot and use it for the founders of the new, Christian Rome: Peter and Paul. The symbolism is a little too neat. Romulus yields to Peter; the mythic founder gives way to the apostolic founders. You can almost see the hagiographers winking.

Then there is June 30.

Over and over again, in sacramentaries and martyrologies and medieval ordines, June 30 shows up as Paul’s own day. The Gelasian and Gregorian sacramentaries preserve a pattern where June 29 is the joint festum and June 30 is the natale of Paul. Later descriptions of Roman practice have the pope celebrate at St Peter’s on the 29th and then go out to St Paul’s on the Ostian Way on the 30th. Old Latin hymnaries explicitly mark June 30 as the day when Paul “bowed his head” and received the martyr’s crown. Armenian usage – in a culture that just happens to be the last great Marcionite stronghold in late antiquity – also preserves June 30 as “Paul Day.”

If June 29 is the Roman overlay, June 30 looks like the older Pauline memory. It’s not hard to imagine that communities where Paul was the primary apostolic figure – Marcionites above all – would have marked his martyrdom with their own feast, and that Rome, in absorbing those communities, could not simply erase their date. The solution is elegant and brutal at the same time: move a big Petrine-Paulinian double feast onto June 29 and then demote June 30 into a kind of afterthought. You still let people keep “their” day, but the headline has been moved.

In the Greek East, where Marcionism was weaker and Rome’s political theology less dominant, June 30 undergoes a different kind of neutralization. There it becomes the Synaxis of the Twelve Apostles – not Paul’s day, but “all of them” together. And in one of the 9th-century homilies embedded in the synaxarial tradition for June 30, we find the apostles described as those who have “stripped off the mortal and corruptible” and become “naked with the Naked,” in Greek γυμνοὶ γυμνῷ. It’s a striking phrase. The entire college of apostles is rhetorically depicted as having reached a state of mystical nakedness with the “Most Pure” Logos.

Park that for a moment and turn to Clement’s “Letter to Theodore” and the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark.

Clement tells Theodore that Mark in Alexandria produced a “more spiritual” gospel for the use of those being perfected, adding certain mystic passages to the public text “yet not revealing all.” He quotes two of these additions around Mark 10. The longer one is the famous story: Jesus raises a rich youth from the dead, the young man “looking upon him, loved him,” and Jesus, after six days, at night, teaches him the “mystery of the kingdom of God” while the youth, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body, comes to him. The shorter insertion hints that the youth later comes “looking at him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body” and is instructed again.

Clement also acknowledges that Carpocratians have taken this text and twisted it, saying that Jesus taught “naked man with naked man.” He rebukes them and insists that such words are not in the authentic text, but he doesn’t deny that the scene is nocturnal, intimate, and initiatory. The neaniskos is clearly an exemplar – someone whose journey from wealthy seeker to mystically initiated disciple explains why Jesus’ challenge in Mark 10 isn’t just a blunt moralism about almsgiving but the threshold to something else.

Now line up the pieces.

On the one hand, we have an Alexandrian tradition of a longer Mark where a rich youth is singled out, loved, raised, and initiated “naked” into the knowledge of the kingdom – a youth whose story cleaves to Mark 10 and whose nakedness becomes a focal point of later controversy. On the other hand, we have a Byzantine June 30 homily that talks about the apostles as “naked with the Naked,” using exactly the idiom that Clement says Carpocratians attached to the scene of Jesus and the youth. If all we had was that phrase, we might dismiss it as an accident. But it’s not just the phrase. It’s the date.

June 30 is the day that, in one stream of tradition, marks Paul’s martyrdom. In the Latin material from the 11th and 12th centuries, Paul’s day is still loaded with Mark 10. Some hymnaries and sermons treat the rich youth of Mark 10 as the failed prototype of apostleship – the one who walked away sad because he had many possessions – and then construe Paul as the one who finally did what the youth could not. Paul is the rich man who actually gave everything up, “counted all things loss,” and followed. There are texts that basically read Paul straight into that scene.

Put those strands together and you get the outline of a lost reading: Mark 10:17–31 as the moment where the young, wealthy Saul meets Jesus; the “second baptism,” the stripping of the old man and putting on of the new, as the core of his transformation; the “mystery of the kingdom” taught at night as the deep Pauline mystagogy; and the neaniskos of Secret Mark as the mythicized Paul, written into the gospel as the paradigmatic initiate.

If that seems far-fetched, remember how much of the Marcionite and proto-Marcionite imagination runs that way already. For them, Paul is not just one apostle among many. He is the apostle. He sits at the right hand of God in their visionary iconography. His letters are the primary scripture. The “pillars” in Jerusalem – James, Cephas, and John – are the ones who messed with his gospel and Judaized it. In some patristic polemic, there is even a floating memory that Paul was a “rich young man” who gave up the Torah and his privileges for Christ. When later Latin texts start tying Paul’s feast on June 30 to the rich youth of Mark 10, they’re not inventing from zero; they’re picking up on a longstanding interpretive possibility and domesticating it.

Now look back at the calendar politics.

If you have a community in which June 30 is “Paul Day,” and in which the gospel read (or at least preached) around that day is the Mark 10/Secret Mark complex where a rich youth is initiated “naked with the Naked” and becomes the exemplary apostle, then the youth is not just any random neaniskos. He is the mythic Paul. The story of his initiation becomes the master narrative for Christian perfection. In that world, Peter enthroned is an afterthought, a later Roman revision. The original image is Paul enthroned, Paul as the one who drank the cup and underwent the second baptism in the full sense.

From that perspective, what happens in the third and fourth centuries looks exactly like what you’d expect from an authoritarian consolidation. You don’t simply delete Paul; that would be suicidal. You pair him with Peter, move the main feast to a day that lines up with the old festival of Romulus, and then either demote or diffuse his own day. In the West, June 30 becomes a quieter commemoration, eventually overwritten by the “First Martyrs of Rome” in the modern calendar. In the East, where June 30 still had to be “something,” Paul’s Day is inflated into the Synaxis of All the Apostles, with the striking ψαλτική flourish that all of them are now “naked with the Naked.” The idiom of the one youth in Secret Mark is universalized and neutralized. No more singular mystagogue Paul; now everyone shares the idiom, and the phrase itself is safely buried in a 9th-century encomium most people will never read.

Seen from that angle, Clement’s Letter to Theodore looks less like an odd Alexandrian footnote and more like a fossil from before the pavement was laid. He is already in the business of fending off Carpocratians, already anxious about rumors of “naked man with naked man,” already editing Mark to defend an official version of things. But he still preserves the skeleton of the story: the rich youth, the nocturnal teaching, the linen cloth and the nakedness, the concentration of Mark 10 as an initiation narrative.

I’m not claiming we can prove, in the modern historical-critical sense, that the youth in Secret Mark “is” Paul. The dossier is messy; the lines are broken; the intervening centuries of anti-Marcionite editing have done their work. What I am saying is that once you take the liturgical evidence seriously – June 30 as the persistent “Paul Day,” the way Mark 10 clings to that date in Latin and Armenian memory, the Byzantine move to make all the apostles “naked with the Naked” on that same day – the hypothesis that the youth was read as Paul in some circles stops being wild and starts being the simplest way to explain why those pieces exist at all.

Under that reconstruction, the battle over the last day of June is the battle over who gets to be the embodied answer to Mark 10: “who then can be saved?” In a Marcionite-leaning universe, the answer is: Paul, the rich youth who actually followed through and became the paradigmatic initiate of the secret gospel. In the later Roman universe, the answer is: Peter and Paul together on June 29, and then everyone else on June 30, all safely folded into a single imperial story in which no one apostle, not even Paul, gets to stand alone as the naked one with the Naked.

Eusebius, Hist.
Eccl. 2.25 (esp.
2.25.5, 8) c. 311–324 Treats their
martyrdoms as
about the same
time under Nero;
quotes Dionysius
for “same time.” None. Under Nero. Eusebius himself
stops short of
“same day”; his
language is
contemporaneous /
seasonal. Depositio
martyrum in the
Chronography of
354 (Rome) 354 Lists a joint
Roman festival
for Peter and
Paul. “III Kal. Iul.”
(= 29 June). Consuls Tusco
& Basso noted
in the entry
(consular
dating). Text gives: “III
Kal. Iul. Petri
in Catacumbas et
Pauli Ostiense…
Tusco et Basso
coss.” A
liturgical
commemoration;
not an explicit
claim they died
the same
calendar day. Jerome, De viris
illustribus (on
Peter, ch. 1/5;
on Paul, ch. 12) 392–393 Tightens
tradition: Paul
died “on the same
day as Peter”
and on the
Ostian Way. No day stated
in the chapters
themselves;
later Roman
liturgy has June
29 for both. “In the
fourteenth year
of Nero.” Jerome’s
formulation becomes
highly influential
in the West (same
day, late in
Nero’s reign). Prudentius,
Peristephanon 12 c. 400–405 Poetically
harmonizes both
strands: one
feast-day for
both, yet “the
selfsame day
renewed when a
full year had
run,” i.e., same
day a year
apart. Alludes to the
shared Roman
feast (understood
as 29 June). None. Latin: “unus
utrumque dies,
pleno tamen
innovatus anno.”
Classic witness
for “same day, a
year apart.” Augustine,
Sermon for the
feast of Peter
& Paul (e.g.,
Sermo 295/299,
“De natali
apostolorum Petri
et Pauli”) early 5th c. Acknowledges they
were not
martyred on the
same calendar
day, yet the
Church keeps a
single solemnity
for both. The Roman feast
June 29 is
presumed and
preached. None. Augustine’s
sermon titles and
placement show
preaching on the
joint natalis;
patristic
collections note
the feast while
allowing different
martyr days. Chronography
of 354
(Depositio
martyrum) 354
(reflecting
practice
c. 336) Latin calendar
entry for
29 June:
“III kal.
Iul. Petri
in Catacumbas
et Pauli
Ostense, Tusco
et Basso
cons.” (“29
June: of
Peter in
the Catacombs
and of
Paul on
the Ostian
Way, in
the consulship
of Tuscus
and Bassus
[A.D. 258].”) Earliest explicit
pairing of
Peter and
Paul with
different places
on the
same feast;
the consular
note underlies
later memory
of a
translation during
Valerian’s persecution.
OAPEN Library+1 Pope Damasus’
epigraphic
program (incl.
Aquae Salviae
/ “Three
Fountains”) c. 366–384 Damasus’ poems
commemorate each
apostle at
his own
locus (Peter
at the
Vatican; Paul
on the
Ostian road
/ beheading
at Aquae
Salviae). Fourth-century
epigraphy presupposes
separate shrines;
useful for
fixing Roman
topography of
the cult.
TaborBlog Ambrose,
hymn “Apostolorum
passio” late 4th c. “Trinis celebratur
viis…” (“[Their
feast] is
celebrated on
three roads”),
i.e., Vatican,
Ostian Way,
and Appian
Way (memory
of the
catacomb translation). Liturgical poetry
that encodes
the two
shrines plus
the catacomb
translation tradition.
TaborBlog Prudentius,
Peristephanon XII
(Passio Apostolorum
Petri et
Pauli) c. 400 Poem for
the apostles’
feast portrays
Rome honoring
Peter at
the Vatican
and Paul
on the
Ostian Way
(dual pilgrimage
/ celebration). Early fifth-century
poetic witness
to established
basilicas and
joint observance
linking both
sites.
csla.history.ox.ac.uk Liber
Pontificalis (Life
of Constantine
and later
entries) 5th–8th c.
compilation Records Constantine’s
construction of
basilicas over
the apostles’
tombs: St
Peter on
the Vatican
hill and
St Paul
“via Ostiensi.” Papal chronicle
preserving the
memory of
imperial building
at the
two distinct
tombs.
portal.sds.ox.ac.uk Notitia
ecclesiarum urbis
Romae (a.k.a.
Salzburg Itinerary) c. 625–642 Pilgrim guide
directs visits
by roads;
after sites
on the
Ostian Way,
“then you
go to
Saint Paul
on the
via Ostiense,”
and later
closes with
Peter on
the Vatican. Confirms 7th-century
pilgrimage pattern
that treats
Paul and
Peter as
two separate
destinations.
TaborBlog De locis
sanctis martyrum c. 642–683 At St
Sebastian on
the Appian
Way: “ubi
sunt et
sepulturae apostolorum
in quibus
XL annis
quieuerunt” (“where
there are
also the
tombs of
the apostles,
in which
they rested
for forty
years”). Attests the
tradition that
Peter and
Paul were
temporarily together
at the
catacombs before
being returned
to their
respective shrines.
Brill Basilica of
St Paul
Outside-the-Walls
— Vatican
(official site) modern
synthesis Summarizes the
tradition: Paul
beheaded under
Nero and
buried ~2
miles along
the Ostian
Way; an
early memoria
gave rise
to the
basilica at
his tomb. Authoritative modern
digest that
also cites
the ancient
“trophies” testimony.