TROPHIMUS (Τρόφιμος, “nourished,” “disciple”), saint. — A Christian from Ephesus and companion of St. Paul, whose arrest in A.D. 58 he unintentionally occasioned.
He was with the Apostle at the end of his third missionary journey, together with Tychicus (v.) and five or six others (Acts 20:4–5), probably with a similar mission. In Jerusalem he was seen with Paul by some Jews from the province of Asia, who, thinking he had been brought by Paul into the inner court of the Temple, even though he was a Gentile and uncircumcised, stirred up the crowd against him.
---
TROPHIMUS — TROYES
Chronological clarification: T. was said to be the first missionary bishop of Gaul sent by the Apostolic See, “from whose source all the streams of the faith in Gaul have received their waters” (n. 328). Relying on this statement, which is not accurate, the bishops of the province of Arles specified in a letter of A.D. 450 to Leo the Great that T. was sent to Arles by St. Peter (PL 54, 879). Caesarius of Arles, in turn, made T. a disciple of the Apostles and assigned him three companions: Paul of Narbonne, Saturninus of Toulouse, and Daphnus of Vaison (cf. Libellus de mysterio sanctae Trinitatis, 17: ed. G. Morin, II, Maredsous 1942, p. 179). Finally, in the ninth century, Ado identified T. with the Trophimus who was a disciple of St. Paul and “ordained bishop of Arles by the Apostles in Rome” (cf. Libellus de festivitatibus Apostolorum, cited by H. Quentin, Les martyrologes historiques du moyen âge, Paris 1908, p. 603). Some have even made T. one of the seventy-two disciples of Our Lord (BHL, 8319). The attempt to identify T. with Serapion of Alexandria is not worth considering.