Maximus of Asia
The Holy Martyr Maximus, stoned for Christ
Martyr · d. c. 250
Commemorated 14 May — Stoned to death under Decius
Maximus was a layman and a merchant who suffered under Decius (249–251). His whole recorded biography turns on two facts: that he used his trade to bring people to Christ, persuading many pagans to believe and to be baptised, and that when he came upon a crowd preparing a human sacrifice to their gods he could not endure the sight, broke in among them, and denounced their impiety aloud, calling their idols the soulless handiwork of men. The crowd, driven to fury, stoned him to death on the spot. He is one of the few martyrs of the synaxarion whose death is a lynching rather than a judicial execution.
A merchant and a missionary
Nothing is transmitted of Maximus' city, family or age. The synaxarion describes him simply as a layman (not a cleric, not a monk) and a merchant — a man of the market, therefore, in constant contact with strangers — and says that he was devout, that he led many pagans to faith in Christ the Saviour, and that he prevailed on them to accept baptism. The Slavonic books add the epithet "of Asia," which places him somewhere in the province of Asia or its neighbourhood, and date him to about the year 250.
The interrupted sacrifice
The one episode preserved is his death. The pagans of the place had assembled to offer a human sacrifice to their gods. Maximus, unable to bear what he saw, and — the synaxarion is careful to say — plucking up his courage for it, rushed in among them, denouncing their impiety and their error at the top of his voice and telling them that the gods they were propitiating with a man's life were lifeless objects made by human hands. The crowd turned on him in a frenzy and stoned him where he stood. So he was crowned as a martyr, having died to prevent a murder.
Feast and commemoration
May 14 (church date; Old Calendar civil May 27) in Antiochian, Slavonic and OCA usage, where he stands among the lesser commemorations of a day headed by Isidore of Chios; the Greek books transfer him to May 7. He has no proper office and is sung with the common of a martyr.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Maximus, 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.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Maximus has no distinct iconographic type. Where he appears in menologion cycles for May he is painted as a layman-martyr: a bearded man of middle years in the long tunic and mantle of a citizen rather than the soldier's short tunic, holding the martyr's cross. The proper scene, in the rare cases where the martyrdom itself is depicted, is his stoning — the martyr standing or fallen with arms raised, the crowd about him with stones in their hands, in the manner of depictions of the protomartyr Stephen. No pre-1900 image of him alone has been located for this repository.
Disputed questions
- His day. Slavonic usage and the Orthodox Church in America keep the martyr Maximus on May 14. The Greek synaxarion regards that placement as a duplication and refers the reader to May 7, where a martyr Maximus is also commemorated: the note printed against May 14 in Greek calendars states in so many words that "the memory of Saint Maximus is superfluously mentioned by some synaxarists" on this day. Whether the May 7 and May 14 entries are one martyr twice recorded or two men of the same name cannot now be decided from the transmitted texts; this entry follows the Antiochian and Slavonic placement on May 14 and records the Greek judgement.
- Not to be confused with the many other martyrs and saints of this very common name — among them Maximus the Confessor (January 21), Maximus of Ephesus, the martyr of the company of Maximus, Quintilian and Dadas (April 28), and Maximus of Moscow the fool-for-Christ (†1434).