Martyrs And Important Figures of Seven Churches of Revelation

Stories from the Land Where Christians Paid in Blood by Hasan Gülday

Walking Past the Sites of Their Fall

When you walk through the ruins of ancient Smyrna in modern İzmir, or stand in the great theatre of Pergamon, or look up at the marble columns of Ephesus, there is something most visitors do not stop to think about. These were not just beautiful Roman cities. They were also places where Christians were killed. Sometimes burned alive. Sometimes thrown to wild animals. Sometimes beaten to death by mobs in the street. The polished archaeological sites we visit today are also, in a quiet way, crime scenes.

The early Christian centuries in Asia Minor were marked by waves of persecution interspersed with longer periods of relative tolerance. The waves came under specific emperors — Nero in the 60s, Domitian in the 90s, Trajan and Hadrian sporadically, Decius in 250, Diocletian and his successors in the early 300s — and they were applied unevenly across the empire depending on local governors, local situations, and local communities of pagan opposition. In between the waves, Christian communities often functioned with little overt trouble. But when persecution came, it could be devastating. And it produced a body of martyrs whose memory shaped the entire subsequent history of the church.

I have written separately on this site about persecution in general. This article is more specific: seven individuals or groups of martyrs from Asia Minor, chosen with deliberate weight given to the Seven Churches region of the Aegean coast, the area I know best as a tour guide. Each of these stories is connected to a specific place I can take groups to today.

A word about historicity. Martyr stories in the early church became a literary form of their own. The earliest accounts, like the Martyrdom of Polycarp, are sober and restrained. The later accounts, written down in the Byzantine period, often layered miraculous and dramatic detail onto the basic core. What I have tried to do below is to give you the core that the early sources record, while flagging where the tradition has been more developed than the strict documentary evidence supports.

Seven martyrs, in chronological order, from the death of the first New Testament-era victims in the 60s AD to the final great mass martyrdom under Licinius in 320 AD. They span almost three hundred years. They span Asia Minor from the Lycus Valley in the west to Sebaste in central Anatolia. And every one of them is rememberable today at a real place.

1. Apphia, Archippus, and Philemon of Colossae (around 60s AD)

You know Philemon. You may not realise you know him, but you do — he is the recipient of the shortest of Paul’s letters, the one written about the runaway slave Onesimus. Philemon was a wealthy Christian of Colossae, a city in the Lycus Valley about eighteen kilometres east of Laodicea, one of the Seven Churches. His wife Apphia and either his son or another church leader named Archippus are both named in the opening of the letter (verses 1-2). The church at Colossae met in their house.

So the three of them, together, were the founding generation of Christianity in the Lycus Valley. The letter to Philemon is among the most personal documents in the New Testament — Paul, an old man writing from prison, asking a younger friend to receive back a slave who had robbed him and run away, but to receive him now as a brother in Christ. The Letter to the Colossians, which Paul wrote at about the same time, was addressed to the wider church meeting in this same house.

Tradition records that their lives ended violently. According to the Apostolic Constitutions and later Byzantine martyrologies, the three were arrested during Nero’s persecution (probably in the mid-60s AD) for refusing to participate in a pagan festival in Colossae — most likely the festival of Artemis Ephesia, whose cult had a presence in the Lycus Valley. A mob attacked their house, dragged them out into the street, and stoned them to death.

2. Antipas of Pergamon (around 92 AD)

Of all the martyrs on this list, Antipas is the only one named in the New Testament itself. Revelation 2:13, in the letter to the church of Pergamon, contains the line: “I know where you dwell, where Satan’s throne is. Yet you hold fast my name, and you did not deny my faith even in the days of Antipas my faithful witness, who was killed among you, where Satan dwells.”

That is everything the Bible directly tells us. The early Christian tradition fills in the details. Antipas was bishop of Pergamon, one of the Seven Churches, and according to the later sources he was a disciple of the Apostle John himself. He led the Christian community in a city dominated by pagan cult activity — the great Altar of Zeus on the acropolis, the imperial cult temple of Augustus, the Asclepion below the city with its healing god, the famous temple of Athena. Pergamon was a religious capital of Roman Asia, and the Christian community there was a small minority swimming against an enormous current.

The trouble came during the reign of Domitian, around 92 AD. The emperor had revived the imperial cult and intensified demands for public participation. Antipas refused. The tradition says he had publicly preached against the pagan cults of the city and had exorcised demons — and that the priests of the pagan temples eventually petitioned the proconsul to act. He was arrested and condemned.

3. Timothy of Ephesus (around 97 AD)

Timothy is one of the most beloved figures in the New Testament. Paul’s most trusted companion, his beloved son in the faith, the addressee of two of the most personal letters in the Pauline corpus. He was from Lystra in Lycaonia, in central Anatolia — his mother Eunice was Jewish-Christian, his father was a Greek, his grandmother Lois had taught him the Scriptures from childhood. Paul recruited him on the second missionary journey, and from that point Timothy travelled and worked alongside him for the rest of Paul’s life.

After Paul’s death, Timothy stayed in Ephesus, where Paul had left him in charge. The tradition, very strongly attested in the early church, is that he served as the first bishop of Ephesus for some thirty years. The brief reference in First Timothy 1:3 — “I urged you to remain in Ephesus” — is the New Testament foundation for this tradition.

His death came during a pagan festival. The Ephesian religious calendar included a procession in honour of Artemis, sometimes called the Katagogia, during which the goddess’s idols were carried through the streets of the city and through the temple district. The crowd, according to the early tradition, became frenzied and unrestrained during these processions. In 97 AD or thereabouts — under the Emperor Nerva, in a period that was nominally tolerant toward Christians — Timothy went out to confront one of these processions. He preached against the worship of idols and tried to stop the crowd from sacrificing. The procession turned on him. He was beaten with clubs, stoned, and left dying in the street.

4. Polycarp of Smyrna (around 155 AD)

The most famous of the Asia Minor martyrs, and the one whose death is best documented. The Martyrdom of Polycarp, written by the church of Smyrna shortly after his death, is the oldest surviving Christian martyrdom account outside the New Testament itself. It is a remarkable document — sober, theologically careful, deeply moving.

Polycarp was bishop of Smyrna, one of the Seven Churches. He had personally known the Apostle John as a young man. Irenaeus of Lyon — who was born in Smyrna and later became one of the most important theologians of the early church — heard Polycarp preach as a boy and remembered it vividly into old age. Polycarp was therefore a living link between the apostolic generation and the developing church of the mid-second century. He had also written a Letter to the Philippians that has survived, visited Rome to discuss the date of Easter with Pope Anicetus, and led the Smyrna church for several decades.

The trouble in Smyrna came during a pagan festival around 155 AD. A round-up of Christians was already under way — several others were killed before Polycarp. The mob then began chanting for Polycarp himself. He hid for a time on the edge of the city but was eventually betrayed by a slave under torture. He was brought to the proconsul Statius Quadratus in the stadium of Smyrna.

The proconsul, perhaps reluctant to execute such an obviously dignified old man, repeatedly urged him to recant. Just say a few words. Just curse Christ. Polycarp’s reply has become one of the most quoted lines of all early Christian literature: “Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He has never done me wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?”

He was sentenced to be burned alive in the stadium. According to the Martyrdom, the fire formed an arch around him without consuming his body, and the proconsul ordered a soldier to stab him with a dagger to finish the execution. The body was then burned to ash, and the ashes were carefully collected by the Smyrna church.

5. Carpus, Papylus, and Agathonica of Pergamon (around 165 AD)

A second Pergamon martyrdom, about seventy years after Antipas. The early account, called The Acts of Carpus, Papylus, and Agathonica, has been preserved in two versions — a Greek version that scholars assign to the persecution of Decius in 250 AD, and an older Latin version that goes back to the reign of Marcus Aurelius around 165. Most modern scholars now think the Marcus Aurelius date is correct.

Carpus was, according to the account, the bishop of Thyatira (another of the Seven Churches), though the precise location of his episcopate is debated. Papylus was his deacon. Agathonica was a Christian woman of Pergamon — in some accounts identified as the sister of Papylus.

The trouble was a public sacrifice required during a Pergamon festival. The proconsul of Asia personally interrogated Carpus, asking him to sacrifice to the gods to demonstrate civic loyalty. Carpus refused. The dialogue, preserved in the Acts, is remarkable for its theological substance — Carpus argues the case for monotheism in plain terms, point by point, sometimes with sharp humour at the expense of the proconsul’s logic. Papylus was then brought in and similarly refused. Both were sentenced to be burned.

6. Pionius of Smyrna (around 250 AD)

A century after Polycarp, a second great martyrdom in the same city. Pionius was a presbyter of the Smyrna church during the persecution of Decius in 250 AD — the first systematic, empire-wide persecution in Christian history. Decius required every inhabitant of the empire to make a public sacrifice and obtain a certificate proving they had done so. For Christians, this was unanswerable.

Pionius was a scholar as well as a pastor. He had written a Life of Polycarp (now lost in its original form, though fragments may survive in later compilations). He was deeply concerned about Christians who would waver under persecution. The issue of apostasy — of believers who would offer sacrifice under duress and then seek readmission to the church — was a major pastoral problem of the period, and one of the most divisive questions facing the Christian community in the third century.

He saw the persecution coming. According to the Martyrdom of Pionius — another of the better-preserved authentic martyr accounts — he put a rope around his own neck before being arrested, as a public sign that he was prepared for what was about to happen. Two companions, a woman named Sabina and a man named Asclepiades, made the same gesture.

They were arrested, brought to the civic authorities of Smyrna, and ordered to sacrifice. They refused. The dialogue preserved in the Martyrdom is sophisticated and at times biting — Pionius mocks the gods of the city, points out the absurdity of imperial cult worship, and gives a clear statement of Christian belief. He was eventually condemned to be burned at the stake in the stadium of Smyrna. The same stadium where Polycarp had died. The execution was carried out on the twelfth of March 250 AD.

7. The Forty Martyrs of Sebaste (320 AD)

The last great martyrdom of the Christian centuries in Asia Minor — and one of the strangest. It happened after Constantine’s conversion, after the Edict of Milan (313 AD) had legalised Christianity across the empire, but before Constantine had united the empire under his sole rule. In the East, Constantine’s co-emperor Licinius had turned against Christians in the late 310s, reversing his earlier tolerance.

Sebaste is the modern Turkish city of Sivas, far in central Anatolia, about four hundred kilometres east of Ankara. In 320 AD, forty Roman soldiers stationed there — members of the Legio XII Fulminata, the Thundering Legion, one of the oldest legions in the imperial army — refused to participate in a required pagan sacrifice. They were Christians, and they would not deny their faith.

The local commander tried persuasion first, then imprisonment, then various tortures. None of it worked. Eventually he resorted to a method designed both to break them and to maximise their suffering.

It was deep winter in central Anatolia, where the winters are genuinely severe. The forty soldiers were stripped naked and forced to stand on the ice of the frozen lake outside Sebaste. A bath house with warm water was set up on the shore as a temptation: any of them could enter at any time, if he would renounce Christ. Those who endured to death on the ice would die for their faith.

One of the forty wavered. He ran for the bath house. According to the account, he died from the shock of the temperature change as he entered the warm water — the symbol of which is debated by every commentator who tells the story. A pagan guard who had been watching the others, seeing what was happening and (according to the tradition) seeing crowns descending from heaven onto the heads of the dying soldiers, threw off his own clothes and joined them on the ice to make the number forty again. All forty died of exposure. Their bodies were burned and the ashes scattered in the river to prevent any cult of relics from forming. The cult formed anyway, and the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste became one of the most painted and celebrated subjects in Eastern Orthodox iconography.

Hire A Professional, Licensed Tour Guide for the Seven Churches of Apocalypse

If you would like to design a tour of the Seven Churches and the surrounding region with attention to the martyr stories — beyond the standard Revelation-letters framework — I would be glad to help. The standard Seven Churches itinerary already covers most of the sites mentioned above. The martyrdom angle simply changes what you are seeing when you visit them. It is the same stadium of Smyrna where Polycarp died and where Pionius died a century later. It is the same Pergamon where Antipas and Carpus were both killed. The Agora of Smyrna where my groups walk in the centre of modern İzmir was once the site of the proconsular court that condemned Polycarp.

Contact me through toursaroundturkey.com. Whatever angle on this region brings you here, I am glad to be your guide for it. See you soon, Hasan Gülday