Feast Day: March 27 Canonized: Pre-Congregation — venerated from the fourth century; feast in the Roman Martyrology Order / Vocation: Lay martyrs — Christians of Bardiaboch, Persia Patron of: Persian Christians · Those persecuted by civil authority for the faith · Eastern Christian martyrs
Nine Names and the King Who Killed Them
They were nine Christians in the Persian city of Bardiaboch, and they died on March 27, 326, in the persecution conducted by the Sasanian king Shapur II — the same king who would, in the decades that followed, kill tens of thousands of Christians across his empire in one of the most sustained anti-Christian campaigns in the history of the ancient Near East.
Their names are preserved: Abibus, Helias, Lazarus, Mares, Maruthas, Narses, Sabas, Sembeeth, and Zanitas. The names are a mixture of Aramaic, Greek, and Persian forms — the composite onomastics of a community that was itself a mixture, the Church of Persia drawing from every ethnic and linguistic stream of the Mesopotamian world. Three of the names — Lazarus, Helias, Narses — are biblical, suggesting communities that took their children's names from Scripture. The others are native Aramaic or Persian, suggesting roots in the world they lived in.
Nothing else is preserved about them individually. No occupations, no ages, no description of the specific charges or the specific torture. What the Roman Martyrology preserves is the essentials: their names, their city, their date, their king, and the fact of their death for the faith.
The context provides what the individual records do not. Bardiaboch was a city in the Persian Empire, in a region where the Christian community had been present since the first or second century — inheritors of the apostolic tradition carried east by merchants and missionaries along the Silk Road and the Mesopotamian trade routes. The Church in Persia in 326 was old enough to have martyrs in the thousands; Shapur's persecution would eventually claim, in various waves, numbers that stagger any accounting.
These nine died in the early phase of it, three years after Shapur began his reign, in a city whose name has largely disappeared from the maps but whose nine Christian dead the Church has carried forward for seventeen centuries.
They are for the communities that are persecuted not for their doctrine or their politics but simply for being Christian in a place where being Christian is enough reason to die. The Sasanian empire was Zoroastrian; Christians were suspect partly because of their association with the Roman Empire, which had recently become officially Christian under Constantine. The nine at Bardiaboch were caught in that larger geopolitical tangle. They died in it with their names intact.
Prayer to the Martyrs of Bardiaboch
O God, who preserved through the Roman Martyrology the nine names of Christians who died at Bardiaboch under a Persian king who was their contemporary of Constantine, grant through their intercession that the persecuted Church of every era may know that its dead are not forgotten, and that the names of those who die for the faith in the most remote places are kept in heaven as clearly as they are kept on any calendar. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Saints Abibus, Helias, Lazarus, Mares, Maruthas, Narses, Sabas, Sembeeth, and Zanitas, pray for us.
| Born | Unknown — Bardiaboch, Persia |
| Died | 27 March 326 — Bardiaboch, Persia — martyred under King Shapur II |
| Feast Day | March 27 |
| Order / Vocation | Lay martyrs — Christians of Bardiaboch |
| Canonized | Pre-Congregation — venerated from the fourth century; Roman Martyrology |
| Patron of | Persian Christians · Those persecuted by civil authority · Eastern Christian martyrs |
| Known as | Martyrs of Bardiaboch · Martyrs of Hubah · Martyrs of Persia (326) |
| Names | Abibus · Helias · Lazarus · Mares · Maruthas · Narses · Sabas · Sembeeth · Zanitas |
| Historical context | Early phase of the forty-year persecution of Christians by Shapur II of Persia (r. 309–379); Shapur's persecution coincided with Constantine's establishment of Christianity in the Roman Empire — Persian Christians were suspect as potential Roman sympathizers |
%20Virgin%20and%20Martyr.jpeg)
No comments:
Post a Comment