Seventeen Monastic Martyrs of India
The Holy Seventeen Monastic Martyrs of India
Venerable Martyr · d. 4th century (traditional)
Commemorated 27 November
The Seventeen Monastic Martyrs of India are a company of monks commemorated on November 27, known from the celebrated story of Barlaam and Josaphat. In that narrative — transmitted in Greek under the name of Saint John of Damascus — they suffered in the fourth century under King Abenner of India, who persecuted the Christians because his people, and even members of his own court, were turning to Christ. Seized by the king's officer and questioned about the whereabouts of the hermit Barlaam, they refused to betray him; they were tortured, brought before Abenner, and at last had their eyes put out and their limbs cut off, exhorting one another to accept death for Christ. Saint John of Damascus likens them to the seven holy Maccabees of the Old Covenant.
The seventeen monks belong to the world of the Barlaam and Josaphat romance, the immensely popular Christianised legend of the conversion of a royal prince of India by a desert hermit. In its telling, King Abenner (Abenner / Avenir) ruled India and hated the Christian faith, the more so as many of his subjects — and some of his own household — were abandoning the old religion for Christ and withdrawing into the monastic life. When the hermit Barlaam, who had brought the king's son Josaphat (Ioasaph) to the faith, could not be found, the king's anger fell upon the monks who had taken up the ascetic life in his realm.
An officer of the king named Arachēs seized a company of them — seventeen in number — and pressed them to reveal where Barlaam was hidden. They refused. When Arachēs threatened them with death, they answered that they did not fear to die, and no torture could break their silence. Unable to move them, he sent them under guard to the king himself. Abenner subjected them to further torments; and seeing that nothing would induce them to give up Barlaam or to renounce Christ, he had their eyes gouged out and then their arms and legs cut off. Throughout their sufferings the monks encouraged one another to endure to the end for the sake of Christ, and so received, in the words of the tradition, their unfading crowns of glory. Saint John of Damascus, to whom the Greek form of the story is ascribed, compares the seventeen to the seven Maccabee brothers who died under Antiochus rather than transgress the Law (commemorated August 1).
Feast and commemoration
November 27 (church date; Old Calendar civil December 10), within the Nativity Fast. The commemoration is closely bound to that of the two protagonists of the same story, Barlaam and Josaphat of India, whose principal feast falls a week earlier, on November 19.
Iconography
No distinct storable image of the seventeen monks has been identified; where they appear it is within the narrative cycles of the Barlaam and Josaphat legend, as a company of tonsured monastics suffering before the king. They would be depicted in the common manner of monastic martyrs, in the habit and bearing the martyr's cross.
Disputed questions
- A commemoration from a legend. The seventeen monks are drawn from the hagiographical romance of Barlaam and Josaphat, whose ultimate roots lie in the Indian life of the Buddha as it passed through Manichaean, Arabic, Georgian and Greek retellings; their historicity is bound up with that of the whole narrative. The Church commemorates them as the story presents them, martyrs of constancy, without prejudging the legend's origins.