CORNELIUS. — A Roman centurion stationed at Caesarea in Palestine, converted to Christianity and admitted to baptism by St Peter through a direct intervention of God (Acts 10:1–11:8). An angel appears to Cornelius and orders him to send messengers to Simon Peter in Joppa (Acts 10:1–8). Peter has a symbolic vision and, while hesitating over its interpretation, the messengers from Cornelius arrive and report what had happened in Caesarea. The Holy Spirit removes all uncertainty from Peter’s mind (Acts 10:9–23). Peter in Caesarea listens to Cornelius’s account, catechises him, and after the descent of the Holy Spirit manifested by the gift of tongues, baptises Cornelius and his household (Acts 10:24–48). Before the community in Jerusalem, Peter justifies having admitted Cornelius and his household to the Church without first subjecting them to Mosaic observances (Acts 11:1–18).
The narrative in Acts is rich in detail and in those repetitions typical of Semitic storytelling, which, while revealing the source from which the writer drew, also convey the sense of the event’s importance for the history of the early Church. It was, in fact, a decisive turning point, brought about by a manifest intervention of God. With the centurion Cornelius, that pagan world which the Jews regarded with cordial disdain and never admitted to equality in religious life—even when, as in Cornelius’s case, they sincerely wished to draw near to the people of God—began officially to enter the Church.
Cornelius was one of those “God-fearers” (Acts 10:2), of whom there were various shades; but he was probably not a proselyte in the strict sense. More likely he distinguished himself from other pagans simply by the uprightness of his life and by his well-known sympathy for the religion of Israel (Acts 10:22). That he belonged to the Gens Cornelia is rendered doubtful by his modest rank as a centurion. He may have been merely a descendant of freedmen. L. Cornelius Sulla, in a single act, emancipated more than ten thousand slaves, who consequently took his gentile name (Appian, I, 100).
Cornelius was a centurion in a cohort which St Luke calls “Italica.” Much discussion has centred on the presence of this cohort in Palestine at the time of the events (c. AD 40). The cohors Italica was in Syria between AD 69 and 157 (cf. E. Jacquier, Les Actes des Apôtres, Paris 1926, p. 312), but there is no positive evidence for the preceding period. However, the silence of the sources does not prove that this cohort or a detachment of it was not already at Caesarea before AD 69; nor should it be forgotten 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 “Italica” might have been at Caesarea on some unspecified duty. Sometimes Roman officers were entrusted 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 at Caesarea, while the Constitutions of the Apostles, VII, 46 (PG I, 1049) make him the second bishop of that city, successor to Zacchaeus. Another tradition (PG 114, 1293–1312) makes him bishop of Skepsis in Mysia, where he died a holy death after confessing the faith of Christ. His feast is kept on 2 February according to the Roman Martyrology, on 13 September according to the Greek menologia.
TEODORICO da Castel San Pietro
ICONOGRAPHY. — By the name of Cornelius some iconographers designated one of the soldiers who, in early Christian sculpture from the end of the 3rd century onward, flee near the spring which St Peter, like Moses, causes to gush from the rock. Characterised as Roman soldiers by the cloak they wear and the round cap (pileus pannonicus) they usually drink from the spring, taking the water in their hands. In them is recognised that Cornelius, “centurio cohortis quae dicitur Italica,” with his companions, who according to Acts 10:24 ff., having met the Apostle, were baptised. Drinking from the spring was an expression among early Christians equivalent to “being baptised.” The iconographic scene therefore depicts Baptism and Cornelius as the first representative of the Gentiles baptised by St Peter. It must however be observed that not all scholars agree with this identification: some persist in seeing in the figures by the spring simply Jews.