SILAS. - Companion of St. Paul and his beloved collaborator. While in the Acts of the Apostles he is always called by this name, in the Pauline letters and in 1 Pt. he is called Silvanus, which seems to be a second name, not a simple Greek-Latin adaptation of the first.
Silas was a Jerusalemite or at least held a certain authority in the mother Church (Acts 15:22), from which he departed to accompany St. Paul to Antioch after the Council of the Apostles, and then throughout the second missionary journey (ibid. 15:40). At Philippi he was imprisoned with Paul and then released with marks of deference, because he too enjoyed the right of Roman citizenship (ibid. 16:19-40). At Beroea he was momentarily separated from the Apostle, who was forced to flee, and who from Athens sent word for him to join him as soon as possible; this happened at Corinth (ibid. 17:14; 18:5). Silas no longer appears in Paul's later life, who associates him in writing the two letters to the Thessalonians (1 Thess. 1:1; 2 Thess. 1:1), composed precisely at Corinth. To the faithful of Corinth Paul will recall the missionary activity of Silas (2 Cor. 1:19), placing it on the same level as that of Timothy and his own.
The identification of Silas with the Silvanus who redacted the first letter of St. Peter (5:12) appears very probable, but is still debated. This suggests that Silas, like John Mark, passed into the orbit of the prince of the Apostles and that he was a missionary at least in some of the regions of Asia to which the letter is directed. Problematic, on the other hand, is the attribution of the apostolic decree and of the Epistle to the Hebrews to Silas, maintained by some. In the Roman Martyrology his death, supposed to have occurred in Macedonia, is commemorated on July 13.