Seventy Martyrs of Scythopolis
The Holy Seventy Martyrs who suffered at Scythopolis
Martyr
Commemorated 28 June — Martyrdom of the seventy at Scythopolis in Palestine
A company of seventy martyrs who suffered at Scythopolis in Palestine — the Greek city on the site of biblical Beth-shean, in the Jordan valley below Galilee — is commemorated in the Greek synaxarion on June 28. Their names, the persecution in which they died and the manner of their deaths are not transmitted; only the number, the place, and the day.
Scythopolis
Scythopolis (Σκυθόπολις) was the chief city of the Decapolis west of the Jordan and, in the later Roman period, the metropolis of the province of Palaestina Secunda — a large and prosperous place with a Christian population from an early date and a bishop of metropolitan rank at the ecumenical councils. It was Beth-shean of the Old Testament, on whose walls the Philistines hung the body of Saul (1 Samuel 31:10), and it retained its Semitic name in the Syriac and Arabic tradition (Beisan). Its bishops include Patrophilus, an Arianising figure of the fourth century; and Scythopolis is the birthplace of Cyril of Scythopolis, the sixth-century monk of the Judaean desert whose Lives of Euthymius, Sabbas and their fellows are the finest monastic biography of the Christian East.
The city therefore stands in the record as a real and well-documented Christian centre, which makes the anonymity of its seventy martyrs the more conspicuous.
The company of seventy
The Greek notice for June 28 records simply that seventy martyrs suffered at Scythopolis. The number is one the tradition uses often — the seventy elders of Moses, the Seventy sent out by the Lord — and in martyrological notices it generally represents a genuine count preserved without the names rather than a symbol; but the point cannot be pressed. No persecution is named. The likeliest settings are the Diocletianic persecution of 303–311, which was severe in Palestine and is documented for the province by Eusebius in his Martyrs of Palestine, or one of the local outbreaks of violence against the Christians of the Decapolis; but Eusebius does not record a company of seventy at Scythopolis, and this entry asserts nothing.
Feast and commemoration
June 28 (church date; Old Calendar civil July 11), in the Greek books; the Slavonic Menaion does not carry the commemoration. No proper service is appointed; the common of many martyrs is used.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4 (common of many martyrs)
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contest received incorruptible crowns from Thee, our God; for possessing Thy strength, they cast down the tyrants and shattered the feeble insolence of the demons. By their intercessions save our souls.
Original translation from the Greek
Iconography
Anonymous companies of martyrs are painted in the Byzantine manner as a crowd: a dense rank of haloed heads, varied in age and beard, filling the field behind two or three figures drawn in full at the front, each with the cross of martyrdom; the number is carried by the inscription rather than by counting the figures. Where a place of martyrdom is known, a walled city may be set behind them. There is no distinctive attribute for the martyrs of Scythopolis and no known image of them; none has been stored for this collection.
Disputed questions
- No names, no date. century is omitted and the entry indexes under unknown.
- Not to be confused with Aphrodisius and Companions of Scythopolis — the martyrs Aphrodisius, Misdas, Macrobius, Valerian, Leontius and Antoninus with their fellows, who overturned the pagan altars of the same city and were stoned and clubbed to death in the early fourth century, and who are kept on May 4. That company is sometimes reckoned at sixty, and the resemblance of a numbered group of martyrs in the same city has caused the two commemorations to be merged in some derivative lists. They are distinct entries in the Greek books, on different days, and are kept distinct here; whether they are ultimately two memories of one event cannot be determined from the surviving notices, and the possibility is recorded without being adopted.
- Nor are these the Seventy Apostles, whose synaxis is January 4, nor the seventy martyred with Sabbas Stratelates.