Abercius and Helen
The Holy Martyrs Abercius and Helen, children of the Holy Apostle Alphaeus
Martyr · d. 1st century
Commemorated 26 May — Martyrdom; kept with their father, the Apostle Alphaeus
Abercius and Helen were a brother and sister of the apostolic generation, named in the synaxarion of May 26 as the children of the Apostle Alphaeus of Capernaum — and so, by the same tradition, brother and sister of the Apostles James and Matthew. Both confessed Christ and both were put to death: Abercius stripped naked and bound so that he was stung to death by bees, Helen stoned. Nothing further of them is transmitted. They are commemorated with their father on his day, and belong to that large class of saints whose whole surviving record is a single line of the synaxarion.
The notice is as brief as a notice can be. The Synaxarion of Constantinople, under the twenty-sixth of May, having commemorated the Apostle Carpus and then the Apostle Alphaeus, adds "and of the holy Martyrs Abercius and Helen"; the Greek and Slavic calendars and the OCA carry the same, identifying the two as the son and daughter of Alphaeus, and giving the two manners of death.
Abercius was bound naked — the notices say to a beehive, or in a place where bees were kept — and left until the swarm had killed him. The punishment is not otherwise attested in the Roman repertoire and reads as a local or improvised cruelty; it is the one concrete detail transmitted about him, and it is what the iconography of the pair would represent if any were known. Helen was stoned after confessing her faith in Christ: the death of the blasphemer under the Law, and so the death by which the protomartyr Stephen and the Apostle Paul's Jewish opponents at Lystra dealt with those they judged to have denied the God of Israel. That Helen suffered by stoning and her brother by a means the Law knew nothing of has suggested to some readers a Galilean setting for her death and a pagan setting for his, but the sources say nothing of place, of judge, or of year, and the inference is no more than that.
Because the tradition sets them in the household of Alphaeus, they are dated to the first century; because it makes no mention of them in the Gospels or the Acts, nothing joins them to the events of the apostolic history. The Church remembers them as it remembers many of the earliest martyrs — by name, by their kinship, and by the manner of their end, and no further.
Feast and commemoration
May 26 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 8), kept with the Apostles Carpus and Alphaeus and, in the Slavic books, with the uncovering of the relics of Macarius of Kalyazin. The two martyrs receive no proper service and no distich of their own in the Greek Synaxarion; they are named within the notice of their father, and the common of the martyrs is used where any hymn is required.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of martyrs)
Thy martyrs Abercius and Helen, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from thee, our God; for possessing thy strength they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions, O Christ God, save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
No proper iconography of these martyrs has been identified. They would be painted after the common types — Abercius a young layman in tunic and mantle holding the cross of his witness, Helen a young woman in maphorion, likewise with the cross — and where a menologion illustrates the day in a full scene, the instruments of their deaths would identify them: for Abercius the hive and the swarm, an attribute otherwise unknown in Byzantine painting; for Helen the stones. In the Russian Menaion-icons, which paint the whole month on one board, they appear, when they appear at all, as two small standing figures behind the two apostles of the day. No pre-1900 image of them, alone or together, has been located for this collection.
Disputed questions
- Not to be confused with Abercius of Hierapolis — Abercius (Avercius) the Wonderworker, bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia and Equal-to-the-Apostles, commemorated October 22 — whose name is the same and whose fame is incomparably greater. Nor with the Helen of the Church's chief memory, Helen the Equal-to-the-Apostles, mother of Constantine, kept on May 21, five days before this day; the proximity of the two dates makes the confusion easy, and the two are wholly distinct.
- The relationship to Alphaeus. The synaxarion's ascription of these martyrs to the Apostle Alphaeus is the only witness, and it is not early. It is retained here, as by all the calendars, but it cannot be checked; if the ascription is secondary, the two martyrs remain of unknown parentage and unknown date, and their entry would properly stand under an unknown century.
- Whether Abercius should be styled Aberkios or Averkius. Greek Ἀβέρκιος is rendered Averkius in Slavic usage and Abercius in Latin; the same name is borne by the bishop of Hierapolis, and the variants are purely orthographic.