Pappias the Martyr
The Holy Martyr Pappias
Martyr · d. c. 303–305
Commemorated 28 June — Beheaded under Diocletian and Maximian
Pappias suffered in the great persecution of Diocletian and Maximian at the beginning of the fourth century — the last and fiercest of the persecutions, in which, as the notice of his day observes, Christians were killed in numbers beyond counting. Of his own passion the synaxarion preserves the essential outline and nothing more: that he confessed Christ before the magistrate, was imprisoned and tortured, remained unmoved in the piety of his fathers, and was at last beheaded. He is commemorated on June 28.
The persecution
The persecution that began with the edicts of Diocletian in February 303 and was pressed on by Maximian in the West and Galerius and Maximinus in the East was the most systematic assault the Roman state ever made upon the Church: first the destruction of the church buildings and the surrender of the Scriptures, then the arrest of the clergy, then — with the fourth edict of 304 — a general requirement of sacrifice from the whole population. It filled the calendar of the Church with martyrs, and the synaxaria carry for those years hundreds of names of which little more than the name survives. Pappias belongs to that number; the notice of June 28 opens by setting him against exactly that background, the multitude of Christians slaughtered in the early fourth century under the two emperors.
The confession and the death
What is transmitted of Pappias himself is a short sequence, the standard shape of an acta reduced to its bones: he was denounced or arrested as a Christian; brought before the authority he confessed Christ openly; he was shut up in prison and put to the torture; he did not yield, but remained steadfast in the ancestral piety — the synaxarion's own phrase, which in the Greek notices carries the sense of holding to the faith received from the fathers rather than the religion of the empire; and being unbroken he was beheaded, receiving the crown by the sword.
No city is named, no magistrate, and no year within the persecution. The English calendars conventionally date him to the early fourth century, and this entry records c. 303–305 accordingly.
Feast and commemoration
June 28 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 11), given in both the Greek Synaxaristes and the OCA calendar. He has no proper service; the common of a martyr is used. On this day he stands among the martyrs of the great persecution beside a much greater commemoration of the same era, the translation of the relics of Cyrus and John, who suffered in the same persecution in Egypt.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of a martyr)
Thy martyr Pappias, 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
Pappias has no distinguishing attribute and no known image. He would be painted in the general martyr type: a man in tunic and mantle, the cross of martyrdom in his right hand, the other hand open before the breast; his age and beard are not fixed by any source, and images in a menologion frame would follow the painter's choice. The sword, the instrument of his death, may be shown beside him. No pre-1900 image has been identified for this collection, and any candidate would have to be distinguished from the several other martyrs of the same name.
Disputed questions
- Not the Papias of Hierapolis. The martyr of this day is not the second-century Papias, bishop of Hierapolis, the hearer of the elders and author of the lost Exposition of the Oracles of the Lord, whose fragments Eusebius preserves. The names are the same in English; the Greek distinguishes them only by the doubled letter (Παππίας against Παπίας), which is not consistently observed in the manuscripts. The Hierapolitan is a writer of the sub-apostolic age, not a martyr of Diocletian.
- Not the Pappias of the Alexandrian companies. A Pappias appears in the synaxaria among the companions of other martyrs — with Diodorus and Claudianus (February 3), and among the soldier-martyrs of Egypt — and the several bearers of the name are not always kept apart in derivative lists. The Pappias of June 28 is a separate commemoration, standing alone in the notice of his day.