CORNELIUS. - A Roman centurion, stationed at Caesarea in Palestine, converted to Christianity through the direct intervention of God and admitted to baptism by St. Peter (Acts 10:1-11:8). An angel appears to C. and commands him to send messengers to Simon Peter at Joppa (Acts 10:1-8). Peter has a symbolic vision, and while he hesitates over the interpretation to give it, C.'s envoys arrive and report to him what had happened at Caesarea. The Holy Spirit removes all uncertainty from Peter's mind (Acts 10:9-23). At Caesarea he listens to C.'s account, catechizes him, and, after the descent of the Holy Spirit manifested by the gift of tongues, has him and his household baptized (Acts 10:24-48). Before the community of Jerusalem Peter justifies himself for having admitted C. and his household into the Church without first subjecting them to the Mosaic observances (Acts 11:1-18).
The narrative of Acts is rich in details and in those repetitions typical of Semitic storytelling, which, while revealing the source from which the writer draws, also give us a sense of the importance the event holds for the history of the early Church. It is, in fact, a decisive turning point, presented as a manifest intervention of God. With the centurion C. that pagan world begins to enter officially into the Church, a world that the Jews regarded with cordial contempt and never admitted to a plane of equality in religious life, even when, as in C.'s case, it was a matter of those who sincerely wished to draw near to the people of God.
C. was one of those "worshippers" of the true God (Acts 10:2), of whom there were various shades; but he was not necessarily a proselyte (v.) properly so called. It is more likely that he was distinguished from other pagans simply by uprightness of life and by a well-known sympathy for the religion of Israel (Acts 10:22). That he belonged to the Gens Cornelia is made doubtful also by his modest rank of centurion. He was, perhaps, merely a descendant of freedmen. L. Cornelius Sulla, at one stroke, emancipated more than ten thousand slaves, who accordingly took his gentile name (Appian, I, 100).
C. was a centurion in a cohort that St. Luke calls "Italian." The presence of such a cohort in Palestine at the time of the events (ca. AD 40) has been much discussed. A Cohors II italica was in Syria between AD 69 and 157 (cf. E. Jacquier, Les Actes des Apôtres, Paris 1926, p. 312), but it is not positively attested for the preceding period. However, the silence of the sources does not prove that the said cohort or a detachment of it was not already at Caesarea before 69; not to mention that, as R. J. Knowling has rightly noted (The Acts of the Apostles, in The Expositor's Greek Testament, II, 3rd ed., London 1904, p. 250), a centurion of the "Italian" cohort could be at Caesarea for some unspecified service. Sometimes Roman officers were charged by Rome's allies with the training of their own soldiers.
St. Jerome (Adv. Iovinianum, I, 39: PL 23, 277) seems to regard him as the founder of the Gentile-Christian Church of Caesarea; while the Constit. Apost., VII, 46 (PG 1, 1049) make him the second bishop of that city, successor of Zacchaeus. Another tradition (PG 114, 1293-1312) makes him bishop of Skepsis in Mysia, where he is said to have died holily after confessing the faith of Christ. Feast on 2 February according to the Roman Martyrology, on 13 September according to the Greek menologies.
Bibliography4 works
Teodorico da Castel San Pietro
ICONOGRAPHY
Under the name of C., some iconographers have designated one of the soldiers who, in Early Christian sculpture from the end of the 3rd century onward, appear next to the spring that St. Peter, like Moses, causes to gush from the rock. Characterized as Roman soldiers by the cloak they wear and by the round cap (pileus pannonicus), they usually drink at the spring, taking the water with their hands. In them are recognized that C., "centurio cohortis quae dicitur Italica," with his companions, who according to Acts 10:24 ff., having met with the Apostle, had themselves baptized. Drinking the water of the spring was, among the early Christians, an expression equivalent to "being baptized." The iconographic scene therefore represents Baptism, and C. as the first representative of the Gentiles baptized by St. Peter. It must be observed, however, that not all scholars agree with this identification: some, in fact, persist in seeing in the figures beside the spring simply Jews.
Bibliography2 works
Luciano De Bruyne