SILA. – Companion of St. Paolo and his beloved collaborator. Whereas in the Acts of the Apostles he is always called by this name, in the Pauline letters and in I Pt. he is called Silvano, which seems to be a second name, not merely a Greek-Latin adaptation of the first.
S. was a Jerusalemite, or at least held a certain authority in the mother Church (Act. 15, 22), from which he departed to accompany St. Paolo to Antioch after the Council of the Apostles, and then throughout the second missionary journey (ibid. 15, 40). At Philippi he was imprisoned with Paolo and then released with signs of deference, because he too enjoyed the right of Roman citizenship (ibid. 16, 19-40). At Beroea he temporarily separated from the Apostle, who was compelled to flee; from Athens the latter sent word to him to join him as soon as possible; this took place at Corinth (ibid. 17, 14; 18, 5). S. no longer appears in the subsequent life of Paolo, who associated him with himself in writing the two letters to the Thessalonians (I Thess. 1, 1; II Thess. 1, 1), composed precisely at Corinth. To the Corinthian faithful Paolo would recall S.’s missionary activity (II Cor. 1, 19), placing it on the same level as that of Timoteo and of his own.
The identification of S. with Silvano, the writer of the first letter of St. Pietro (5, 12), appears very probable, though it is still debated. This suggests that S., like Giovanni Marco, entered the orbit of the Prince of the Apostles and was a missionary at least in some of the regions of Asia to which the letter is addressed. The attribution to S. of the apostolic decree and of the Epistle to the Hebrews, maintained by some, is instead problematic. The Roman Martyrology commemorates his death, presumed to have occurred in Macedonia, on 13 July.