Ananias of Persia

The Holy Martyr Ananias the Persian

Martyr · d. c. 345

Ananias the Persian was a martyr of the Church in Persia, put to death for his confession of Christ in the fourth century, during the long persecution of Christians under the Sassanid king Shapur II. The one saying preserved of him belongs to the hour of his torture: seeing what his tormentors could not, he cried that he beheld a ladder reaching to heaven and radiant men calling him up to a shining city of light — and so, in that vision, he gave up his life. He is commemorated on December 1 among the many martyrs whom the Persian church offered up in the fourth century, whose sufferings under the fire-worshipping empire rivalled those of the early Church under Rome.

Of Ananias the Persian almost nothing survives beyond the fact of his martyrdom and a single luminous word. He belonged to the Christians of the Persian empire in the fourth century, at the time of the great persecution launched by Shapur II (309–379), under whom the Church east of the Roman frontier — suspected of loyalty to the Christian emperors of Rome — endured four decades of slaughter that gave the Persian calendar its innumerable martyrs. Arrested and tortured for refusing to deny Christ or to worship the sun and fire of the Persian cult, Ananias bore his sufferings to the end.

The synaxaria preserve of him only the confession he made under torture, when his gaze was already fixed beyond the instruments of his death: "I see a ladder leading up to heaven, and radiant men calling me to a wondrous city of light." The image joins the ladder of the patriarch Jacob to the shining city of the Apocalypse, and the martyr's words became the whole of his memorial — a witness that the vision granted to the dying confessor was more real to him than the torments of his body. He died about the year 345.

Because no full passion of his is transmitted, the details of his rank, his place, and the manner of his death are not recorded; he is honoured simply as one of the Persian martyrs of the age of Shapur, whose company the Byzantine calendar commemorates on many days of the year.

Feast and commemoration

December 1 on the church calendar (Old Calendar civil December 14), kept within the Nativity Fast, together with the prophet Nahum and the righteous Philaret the Merciful. Ananias has no proper service; he is commemorated with the common office of a holy martyr, and both the Greek and the Slavic calendars list him by name on the day.

He is not to be confused with the Old Testament Ananias — one of the Three Holy Youths of the Babylonian furnace (Hananiah/Shadrach), commemorated December 17 — nor with the Apostle Ananias of Damascus (October 1).

Hymns

Troparion — Tone 4

Thy martyr Ananias, O Lord, in his contest received from thee our God the crown of incorruption; for possessed of thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and broke the powerless boldness of the demons. By his supplications, O Christ God, save our souls.

Original translation from the Greek

Iconography

No proper iconographic type is transmitted for Ananias the Persian, and no early image identified with him is known; he would be depicted, where he appears at all, in the common manner of a martyr — a young man holding the cross of his confession, in a martyr's cloak. No storable image has been found, and the entry is listed in the the list of icons still being sought register. (The Menologion of Basil II miniature captioned "Ananias" belongs to a different saint, the Apostle Ananias of Damascus, and must not be attached here.)