JOHN AND PAUL, Saints, Martyrs. - The information concerning them is intricate, obscure and controversial. They are commemorated in the Hieronymian Martyrology on 26 June; the ancient Sacramentaries have several Masses in their honor; they are mentioned by the Itineraries of the 7th century, and around the middle of the 6th century their names were inserted into the Canon of the Mass.
There exists a rather legendary Passio, composed between the end of the 5th century and the beginning of the 6th, of which three substantially identical recensions are known, but diverging in their conclusion. In the oldest of these it is narrated that G. and P. were two brothers, officers in the army of Constantine the Great and attached to the person of his daughter, Constantia. After having accompanied the general Gallicanus on an expedition in the East, they returned to Rome, and at the death of Constantia they received as a gift part of her property. When Julian the Apostate ascended the throne, they were summoned by the Emperor himself to give an account of their faith, and since they refused to obey they were executed and buried secretly in their own house on the Caelian Hill by the campidoctor Terentianus. At the accession of the emperor Jovian, certain demoniacs revealed their burial place; Terentianus was converted and wrote their Passio. In another recension, however, it is said that Jovian charged the senator Byzans to search for the bodies of the martyrs and to build a basilica in their honor. Finally, in a further reworking of the Passio, the episode of Sts. Crispus, Crispinianus and Benedicta was added, friends of the martyrs and like them put to death by Julian and buried in the same house, where Byzans with his son Pammachius built the Basilica.
In all probability the Passio was written to explain and justify the change in the name of the basilica on the Caelian Hill from titulus Pammachii or Bizantii, as it is called in documents and monuments down to the end of the 5th century, to that of titulus SS. Johannis et Pauli, as it is called from the 6th century onward. The Basilica in fact, built at the beginning of the 5th century by the senator Pammachius, was obtained from the transformation of an old Roman house of the 2nd or 3rd century, of which the perimeter walls and part of the pictorial decoration remain clearly visible today. Before the transformation, however, there existed in the same house a small domestic oratory, adorned with paintings and with a kind of confessio, which was completely filled in when the Basilica itself was built.
The historical existence of the martyrs, universally believed on the authority of the Passio and which seemed confirmed by the discovery of the old oratory and of certain pits beneath it, regarded as their original tomb, received a strong shock when it was clearly proved that the Passio itself is a plagiarism of the historically certain episode that befell the two officers Juventinus and Maximinus, who died in the East under Julian the Apostate. It was thought then, also because of the improbability of a burial within the walls of the city in the 4th century, that these were not two Roman martyrs but Eastern ones, whose relics, brought from the East, were first deposited in the domestic oratory in the 4th century and then transferred to the Basilica which took its name from them. Others, on the other hand, thought that these were the apostles G. and P., in whose honor the basilica on the Caelian Hill was dedicated and who were afterwards believed to be local martyrs because of the existence of the relics. Others finally thought that these were the apostle Paul and St. John the Baptist, whose relics were distributed to many churches precisely at the beginning of the 5th century; and this both because of the relations existing between G. and P. and Gallicanus, founder of the Basilica Oatiense dedicated precisely to those two Saints, relations clearly attested by the Passio, and because of the liturgical feast, since the commemoration of G. and P. falls on 26 June, a date however ignored by the Passio, almost midway between that of the two titular Saints, 24 and 29 June.
In any case, from the written and figurative testimonies dating back to the 5th century, one cannot but think of the real existence of the two martyrs, perhaps coming from the East.
Bibliography11 works
Agostino Amore
ARCHAEOLOGY
The oldest images of the two martyrs are in the long mosaic series of saints, indicated with their names, in the central nave of the basilica of St. Martin "in caelo aureo," today Sant'Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna (6th century). Also in the 6th century a church in their honor in the same city is mentioned by Fortunatus in the life of St. Martin (IV, 689).
In Rome, the two martyrs were depicted in the ancient deaconry of Santa Maria in Via Lata, in a fresco of the second half of the 9th century, in which they are represented with their names beside them (Wilpert, Mosaiken, pl. 218, 2-3).
In the underground area of the basilica on the Caelian dedicated to the two martyrs, these were represented in a fresco of the end of the 11th or the beginning of the 12th century; the Redeemer stands between the archangels Michael and Gabriel; on the left the image of St. G. is destroyed; on the right, St. P., indicated by name, is missing the head and feet; he is dressed in courtly attire studded with gems (Wilpert, Mosaiken, p. 651, pl. 243).
From the liturgical point of view, a "praefatio" is to be noted, reported in a "Missa" inserted in honor of the two martyrs in the Sacramentary known as the Leonine, in which their tomb is explicitly indicated "in ipsis visceribus civitatis."
The two martyrs gave their title to the first monastery near the Vatican Basilica, founded by Leo the Great (1440-51), mentioned several times afterward in the Liber pontificalis (I, 239, 422, 484); the church of the monastery appears in the catalogues of churches down to the time of Martin V (1417-31). Grimaldi and Piazza held that it was to the north of the ancient Basilica, whereas Duchesne placed it to the west (L. Duchesne, Notes sur la topographie de Rome au moyen âge, XII, Vaticana, in Mélanges d'arch. et d'histoire, 34 [1915], pp. 314-24). The non-Damasan elogium of Sts. G. and P., attributed by some to Caelius, belonged instead to the said church in the Vatican (A. Ferrua, Epigrammata Damasiana, Vatican City 1942, pp. 229-30).
Enrico Josi