Third Sunday of Lent

Saints commemorated

• Martyr Agapius and Seven with Him

  Agapius and his companions (†c. 303) were a band of young men of Palestine — Agapius, Plesius, Timolaus, Romulus, two named Dionysius and two named Alexander, eight in all — who gave themselves up to martyrdom at Caesarea in Palestine during the Great Persecution of Diocletian. Their martyrdom is not a synaxarion legend but a scene witnessed and recorded by Eusebius of Caesarea in his Martyrs of Palestine: at a public spectacle in which Christians were being thrown to the beasts, six of them stepped forward with their own hands bound before the governor Urbanus, declaring themselves Christians and demanding to share the martyrs' lot; imprisoned, they were joined by Agapius — already a confessor hardened by earlier torments — and by another Dionysius who had ministered to them. All eight were beheaded together on one day. The Church keeps their memory on March 15, honouring in them a martyrdom sought rather than merely endured.

• Holy Martyr Alexander (270-275)

  Alexander (†c. 270–275) was a priest of Side, the port-city of Pamphylia on the southern coast of Asia Minor, who suffered martyrdom in the persecution under the emperor Aurelian. Arrested for his bold preaching of Christ and brought before the governor Antoninus, he confessed the faith without flinching and was put through a succession of savage torments; through them, the synaxarion relates, the Lord upheld him beyond nature, so that the tortures failed of their purpose. At the last he was beheaded, and — in the received account — the very judge who had condemned him was moved by what he had seen. He is commemorated on March 15.

• Aristobulus of Britain

  Aristobulus (1st century) was one of the Seventy Apostles and, by the tradition of the East, the brother — or kinsman — of the Apostle Barnabas of Cyprus. Paul greets "those of the household of Aristobulus" (Romans 16:10), and the Church numbers him among the fellow-labourers of the Apostle, ordained bishop and sent to preach the Gospel in the far West. He is honoured as the first apostle of Britain, carrying Christ to the islands at the edge of the world, where — among a fierce and unbelieving people who beat and mocked him — he founded the Church, made many converts, and, in the received Eastern account, reposed in peace among those he had won. He is commemorated in his own right on March 15 (Greek usage; the Slavic and American calendars keep him on March 16), and again with a company of his fellow apostles of the Seventy on October 31, and among them all in the Synaxis of the Seventy on January 4.

• Manuel of Crete

  Manuel the Cretan (†1792) was a new martyr of the Ottoman period. Born a Christian in Crete in the eighteenth century, he was taken captive as a child by the Turks and compelled to accept Islam. Grown to manhood and unable to bear the denial of his baptism, he openly confessed himself a Christian once more, and for this "apostasy" from Islam — a capital crime under Ottoman law — he was beheaded on the island of Chios in the year 1792. He is numbered among the company of new martyrs who, under the yoke, washed away a forced conversion in their own blood, and is commemorated on March 15.

• Nicander of Egypt

  Nicander (†c. 302) was a Christian of Egypt — remembered in the tradition as a physician — who suffered martyrdom in the Great Persecution under Diocletian. His crime, in the eyes of the persecutors, was an act of mercy: he sought out the bodies of the martyrs who had been put to death and left unburied, and gave them honourable burial, and he ministered to the confessors held in prison. Seized in the very act of caring for the dead, he refused to renounce Christ and was put to death — flayed alive, the synaxarion says. He is commemorated on March 15.

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