Maruthas of Martyropolis

Bishop of Maiferkat

Maruthas was a Syriac-speaking Christian of upper Mesopotamia, of the region of Sophanene on the Roman side of the frontier, and became bishop of Maiferkat (Miyafarqin; Greek Martyropolis, Arabic Mayyafariqin) before the close of the fourth century. He was a man of wide learning — versed in the Scriptures and in the doctrine of the Church, and, the tradition insists, skilled in the healing of the body as well as the soul, a physician whose art opened to him doors that were closed to other churchmen. He took part in the affairs of the wider Church early: he was present at councils in the Roman East, and is associated with the reaction against the Messalian error and with the memory of the exiled John Chrysostom, to whose cause he was sympathetic.

The city of martyrs

The deed for which his city and his name are joined forever was the gathering of the relics of the Persian martyrs. Across the fourth century the Church within the Sasanian empire had suffered a persecution of terrible length under Shapur II — bishops, clergy, ascetics, and laity without number put to death over some forty years (the martyrs whom the calendars keep under Shapur: bishops such as Sadoth of Persia, Milos of Persia, Abdias, and their companions). Maruthas laboured to recover the bodies and bones of these martyrs from Persia and to translate them across the border into Maiferkat, enriching his city with so great a treasure of relics that it was renamed Martyropolis — "city of the martyrs" — and became a centre of their veneration. To preserve their memory he is credited with composing Acts of the Persian Martyrs and a martyrology, so that the Syriac Church's record of that age owes much to his hand.

Peacemaker between the empires

Maruthas's standing at the Persian court is the second thread of his story. Under Yazdegerd I (399–420), a king milder toward the Christians than his predecessors, Maruthas won a remarkable favour — by his affable and holy life and (the sources add) by his medical skill, healing the king or those about him. The emperors Arcadius and Theodosius II employed him as their ambassador to Persia, and he used the trust of both courts to serve the Church: he helped turn Yazdegerd toward toleration, so that the churches destroyed in the persecution might be rebuilt and the faith practised in peace. A famous story — told with the relish of hagiography — has the Zoroastrian magi, jealous of his influence, hiding a man beneath the fire-altar to cry out as though the sacred fire itself denounced the bishop; Maruthas exposed the fraud, and the king's esteem for him grew the greater.

The organising of the Persian Church

The fruit of this peace was the Synod of Seleucia-Ctesiphon in 410, held under the presidency of the catholicos Isaac with Maruthas as the emperor's representative and the chief architect of its work. The synod set the Church of Persia in order under the catholicos of Seleucia-Ctesiphon as its head, received the canons and the Creed of Nicaea, and regularised the sees and the discipline of a Church that persecution had scattered. Maruthas thus stands among the founders of the ordered life of the Church of the East, having brought to it both the Nicene faith and a settled constitution. He is said also to have translated Greek conciliar canons into Syriac and to have written liturgical and exegetical works.

Repose

Maruthas returned to his own city and reposed there in peace about the year 422 (some place his death a little earlier, before 420). He was buried among the martyrs whose relics he had gathered, and Martyropolis kept his memory with theirs. He is honoured as Ὅσιος — a holy and venerable bishop — in the Byzantine calendars, and as a saint in the Syriac, Latin, and Oriental Churches; his feast in the East is kept on February 16 with the martyrs of his city, and the Roman martyrology commemorates him on December 4.