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Japanese No, Atticus is not in the Bible. Neither is Atticus Aemilius Pulcher, the Roman investigator in The Chosen, who was created for the series. The name is Latin, from the Greek Attikos, “from Attica,” the region around Athens.
The name never appears in Scripture, but its home does. Attica is the country around Athens, and Athens is where Paul stood in a city full of idols and told its people about the God they did not know. Follow the name far enough and it brings you to one of the great speeches in Acts.
Atticus Aemilius in The Chosen
In The Chosen, Atticus Aemilius Pulcher, played by Elijah Alexander, is one of the Roman cohortes urbanae sent from Rome to investigate the Zealots and then Jesus. He appears from the second season and joins the main cast in the third. No Gospel mentions him, or any Roman official sent to look into Jesus in this way. The series says as much in the opening credits of its first episode: “Backstories and some characters or dialogue have been added.”
The force he belongs to was real. Augustus created the cohortes urbanae, the urban cohorts, to police the city of Rome under the city prefect.
What does Atticus mean?
Atticus is the Latin form of the Greek Attikos, “from Attica,” the region that surrounds Athens. Several Greeks of the Roman period bore it, as did Romans with Greek connections. The best known is Titus Pomponius Atticus (110–32 BC), a Roman banker and literary patron and the closest friend of Cicero, whose letters to him still survive. In modern English the name is known mainly from Atticus Finch, the Alabama lawyer in Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).
Is Atticus in the Bible?
No one in Scripture is named Atticus, and the name has no Hebrew form. The Bible does visit the place the name comes from. In Acts 17, Paul waits in Athens for his companions and is “greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols” (Acts 17:16). Brought before a meeting of the Areopagus, the city’s council, he begins: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god” (Acts 17:22-23).
When Paul spoke of the resurrection of the dead, “some of them sneered, but others said, ‘We want to hear you again on this subject’” (Acts 17:32). A few believed, and Luke names two of them: Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, and a woman named Damaris (Acts 17:34).
Atticus of Constantinople
The best-known Christian of the name was Atticus, archbishop of Constantinople from 406 until his death in 425. His story has a turn in it. He had been one of John Chrysostom’s bitterest opponents and helped to depose him. Later, working to reconcile Chrysostom’s followers, he restored Chrysostom’s name to the prayers in which the church remembered its deceased bishops, around 412–415.
The historian Socrates Scholasticus remembered him for his gifts to the poor, including the poor of other cities. Once he sent three hundred pieces of gold to a presbyter at Nicaea, with a letter asking that the money go to the needy without regard to their beliefs: “feed the hungry whether they agree with us in sentiment, or not.”
Paul told the Athenians that God “is not far from any one of us” (Acts 17:27). Four centuries later a bishop who carried their region’s name sent gold to feed the hungry of another city, whatever they believed.
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