Gelasius the Martyr
The Holy Martyr Gelasius
Martyr
Commemorated 6 June — Beheaded after scourging, having ministered to the confessors
Gelasius is a martyr of one of the general persecutions, commemorated on June 6 and known from the synaxarion notice alone. Before he suffered himself he served those who were suffering: he gave away everything he owned to the poor, put on a long white garment, and went among the imprisoned and tortured Christians, kissing their wounds and strengthening them to endure. That white robe made him conspicuous, and he was arrested. Brought before the magistrate, he confessed Christ openly and denounced the emptiness of the idols; the judge at first treated him with contempt, then had him flogged and finally beheaded. Neither his country, his judge, nor the year of his martyrdom is transmitted.
The record
Of Gelasius nothing survives but a synaxarion notice — a short paragraph in the Greek service-books for June 6, without an acta, a place, or a date. What it does preserve is unusually specific about how he came to be a martyr, and it is that sequence, rather than any biography, which the Church commemorates.
The servant of the confessors
The notice sets him in a time of open persecution, when Christians were being held, tortured and killed. Gelasius' response was first almsgiving: he distributed the whole of his property and goods to the poor, stripping himself of the estate that would otherwise have been confiscated, and freeing himself for what followed.
He then took up a ministry the persecution literature knows well and the calendars rarely name. Clothed in a long white garment — the notice makes a point of it, and it can hardly be other than a deliberate sign, the robe of one already reckoning himself among the baptised dead — he went about among the confessors: to the prisons, to the places of torture, to those lying wounded after their examinations. He kissed their wounds, and he urged them to stand firm and not to yield in the last hours. In the persecutions the Church honoured this service greatly and the authorities punished it severely: to comfort the condemned was to publish one's own Christianity, and many who did it followed the men they had comforted.
Confession and martyrdom
So it fell out. Gelasius was seized by the pagans and brought before the ruling magistrate. There he did not temporise: he confessed Christ with boldness and exposed the deceit of the idols to the court. The notice preserves the judge's first reaction — contempt; he made nothing of the man, as though the confession were beneath notice. That did not last. Gelasius was scourged, and when the flogging did not move him he was beheaded, and so received the crown.
Feast and commemoration
June 6 (church date; Old Calendar civil June 19). Gelasius is kept in the Greek synaxaria of the day, and is the only martyr among a company otherwise made up of ascetics — Hilarion the New of Dalmatia, Bessarion, Attalus, Anoub, Photius — apart from the five virgins. He is also carried in the Slavic calendars for the day, as "Martyr Gelasius," without further detail. He has no proper office; the common of a martyr is used and his notice is read at the synaxarion.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Gelasius, O Lord, in his contest received an incorruptible crown from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, he cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By his intercessions save our souls.
Iconography
No individual iconography of Gelasius has developed, and no pre-1900 image of him has been identified for this collection. In the June leaf of a painted menologion he would appear in the martyr's type — a layman in tunic and mantle, holding the cross of his confession, beardless or lightly bearded, with the scene of his beheading beside him. An iconographer working from his notice would have two attributes proper to him and to almost no one else on the calendar: the long white garment in which he went among the prisoners, and the gesture of kissing the wounds of a bound confessor.
Disputed questions
- Date and place unknown. The notice fixes neither. The setting — mass imprisonments, judicial torture, a provincial magistrate, beheading as the sentence for a citizen — fits the third or early fourth century, and most plausibly the Diocletianic persecution; but no year or province is transmitted and none is asserted here. He is indexed among the saints whose era the sources do not fix.
- Not to be confused with Gelasius of the Ten Martyrs of Crete (December 23, †c. 250), one of the ten Cretans martyred at Gortyna under Decius — a genuinely distinct martyr who happens to share the name. The two are separated by day, place and manner of death: the Cretan Gelasius suffered with nine companions in Crete, this Gelasius alone, and his distinguishing act is the ministry to the confessors.
- Not to be confused with the two popes of Rome named Gelasius (Gelasius I, †496, and Gelasius II, †1119), nor with Gelasius the historian of Caesarea (fourth century), nor with the mime-actor Gelasinus/Gelasius of Heliopolis (†297, kept in some calendars on February 26), who was baptised on stage and stoned by the theatre crowd. The name was common, and the calendars carry several bearers of it.
- Companions in the calendar, not in the passion. Greek calendars for June 6 print Gelasius immediately after the five virgins of Caesarea, and a few modern lists run the names together as though he suffered with them. The notices are separate and describe different deaths; the juxtaposition is calendrical.