Simeon, Isaac and Bachtisius of Persia
The Holy Martyrs Simeon, Isaac and Bachtisius of Persia
Martyr · d. c. 339, in Persia
Commemorated 18 May — Beheading after imprisonment without food, for refusing to worship fire and the sun
Simeon, Isaac and Bachtisius were Christians of the Persian empire who died for refusing to renounce Christ and to conform to the state religion of the Sasanians. Brought before their judges and required to worship the fire and the sun, they answered that they would not turn from the Creator of all things to reverence His creatures; they were tortured, shut up in prison and left seven days without food, and at the last beheaded. Their names are Syriac and Persian rather than Greek — Bachtisius represents the Syriac Bokhtishoʿ, "Jesus has delivered" — and they belong to the vast company of the martyrs of the Church of the East under Shapur II, whose forty-year persecution (from about 339) produced more martyrs than any single Roman persecution and of whom the Byzantine calendar preserves only a fraction, often reduced, as here, to a name and a manner of death.
The Persian martyrs and the worship of fire
The Christianity of Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau lay under a state that had its own priesthood and its own established cult. Zoroastrian worship centred on the sacred fire and on the veneration of the luminaries, above all the sun; the mobads were an order of the empire, and the refusal of a subject to reverence fire and sun was not merely religious dissent but a civil offence. The characteristic Persian martyr-act therefore turns not on a refusal to sacrifice to idols — the Persians had few images — but on a refusal to honour the elements, and the martyrs' answer is always the same distinction: that fire, sun and water are good creatures of God and are not to be adored in His place.
The passion of these three preserves that answer almost as a formula: "We will not turn away from the Creator of all, and we will not worship fire or the sun." It is the sentence that recurs, with small variations, through the whole Persian martyrology, from the martyrdom of Simeon bar Sabbae to the acts of Aithalas of Persia and Milos of Persia.
The persecution under Shapur
The persecution to which the Greek calendars assign these martyrs is that of Shapur II (309–379), which broke out about the year 339 and continued in waves for four decades. Its occasion was political as much as religious: after the conversion of the Roman empire, the Christians of Persia — hitherto a tolerated minority — were suspect as the co-religionists of Rome, and Shapur laid on them a double poll-tax for the war and required of their bishops that they collect it. Refusal was treated as treason; the great martyrdoms began with the clergy of the capital and spread through the provinces, and are recorded, in far greater detail than the Byzantine synaxaria preserve, in the Syriac Acts of the Persian Martyrs.
Of Simeon, Isaac and Bachtisius the surviving notice gives no city, no judge and no office. They are described simply as Christians who lived in Persia; they were arrested together, pressed to apostatise and to be converted to fire-worship, refused, and were cruelly tortured. Then they were thrown into prison and, for seven days, given nothing to eat — the starvation of prisoners being a regular Sasanian means of breaking the will without spending an executioner's time. When they were brought out unchanged, they were beheaded.
That is the whole of the record, and the honest length of their Life. What the notice conveys, and what it was written to convey, is the ordinary shape of the Persian martyrdom: not spectacular torments but attrition — the demand, the refusal, the beating, the hunger, the sword.
Feast and commemoration
May 18 (church date; Old Calendar civil May 31), where they stand among the day's lesser notices, after the martyrs Peter of Lampsacus and his companions and Theodotus of Ancyra and the seven virgins. No proper office is appointed; they are commemorated at the sixth ode of the canon and in the synaxarion reading, with the common of several martyrs. In every year the day falls within the Pentecostarion, whose movable propers take precedence.
They are remembered with the whole body of the Persian martyrs, whose commemorations are scattered thickly through the Byzantine year and who are, taken together, the largest single group of martyrs in the calendar.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of several martyrs)
Thy martyrs, O Lord, in their contests 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 supplications, O Christ God, save our souls.
Iconography
They are painted, where they appear at all, in the manner proper to the Persian martyrs of the calendar: laymen of the East in long belted tunics and cloaks, sometimes in the Persian cap, with the small cross of the martyrs in the right hand and the left hand open before the breast; two bearded and one, usually the youngest, beardless. The distinguishing element in scenes of Persian martyrdom is the fire-altar — the sacred flame the martyrs refuse to reverence — set to one side of the composition, with the sun above it, and the sword below.
No pre-1900 image of these three was located for this collection. The Menologion of Basil II, which supplies miniatures for very many minor saints, covers only September to February and cannot be used for a May commemoration; and the Syriac and Persian traditions have left almost no surviving painted cycle of their own martyrs. The entry wants an icon.
Disputed questions
- The date: third century or fourth? The Slavonic synaxarion and the OCA place these martyrs "in the third century under the emperor Sapor," while the Greek day-lists give 339. The two are hardly reconcilable, and the later date is much to be preferred: Persian Christianity was not systematically persecuted in the third century, when it was still a small and largely captive community, and the name Sapor (Shapur) belongs to three kings. The great persecutor of Christians was Shapur II, and 339 is the received year for the outbreak of his persecution; the "third century" of the Slavonic notice is best explained as a copyist's or compiler's slip for the reign of Shapur (Sapor) without regard to which Shapur was meant. This entry follows the fourth-century dating and flags the divergence.
- A duplicated commemoration on May 16. The same three names appear in some Greek day-lists two days earlier, on May 16, as "Bachtisoes, Isaac and Simeon"; the OCA and the Slavonic Menaion keep them on May 18. The May 16 notice is very probably the same company under a displaced date, but the possibility that the Greek synaxarion means a distinct group has not been excluded, and no independent Syriac witness has been brought to bear. The commemoration is authored here at May 18, and the May 16 notice is left flagged rather than silently merged.
- Not Simeon bar Sabbae. The Simeon of this company is not Simeon bar Sabbae, Bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon (April 17, †344), the hieromartyr who led the Church of Persia and died with a great company on Great Friday; nor is the Isaac here the Isaac of any of the Persian bishop-martyrs of that name. The three of May 18 are laymen, so far as the notice allows us to say anything at all.