Arrest and the Demand to Recant

Denounced to the Arab authorities as a Christian and a former Muslim, Abo was arrested and imprisoned in fetters. Before the judge he was pressed to return to Islam and so save his life; he refused steadfastly, declaring himself ready not only to be tortured but to die for Christ. The refusal, freely made and repeated, is the confession on which his martyrdom rests.

Tradition: Georgian Orthodox

The Denunciation and Arrest

After roughly three years of open Christian life in Tbilisi (see Living Openly as a Christian), Abo was denounced to the Arab authorities and arrested. The Life presents the arrest as the predictable consequence of a public apostasy that the authorities could no longer overlook, brought to a head under a ruler less willing to tolerate it (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, c. 786–790; trans. Lang, Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 2nd ed., SVS Press, 1976, pp. 115–133; OCA notice, “Martyr Abo the Perfumer,” oca.org, on the capture by the servants of a new emir). Abo was seized, and the synaxarion tradition, following the Life, records that he underwent imprisonment in fetters before his trial and execution (OCA notice, oca.org). [Disputed: the precise sequence and duration of the imprisonment, and the exact identity and title of the presiding authority (emir, governor, or judge), rest on the single narrative of the Life and are not independently documented; the tradition consistently presents a formal legal process — arrest, imprisonment, examination, and the demand to recant — rather than a summary lynching (Lang, Lives and Legends, 1976).]

The legal character of the process matters. Abo was not killed in a riot or by private vengeance; he was tried under the law of the emirate, and the charge was, in effect, the specific one that the law recognized: apostasy from Islam (see Tbilisi under the Arab Emirate). This is why the demand made of him was not “become a Christian no longer” in some vague sense but the precise legal demand that he return to Islam — for under the apostasy law, a return to Islam would end the matter, and only a refusal to return would carry the penalty (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976; and see The Pattern of the Convert-Martyr).

The Demand to Return to Islam

The heart of the confrontation, as the Life presents it, is the offer of life on a single condition: renounce Christ, return to the faith of your birth and your people, and you will be spared. This is the standard form of the confession-scene in the neomartyrdoms under Islam, and it is also, in Abo’s case, the historically plausible core, because it follows directly from the legal situation. The apostasy law did not seek the death of the convert for its own sake; it sought his return, and offered death only as the alternative to return (on the structure of the demand, common to the convert-martyrdoms and grounded in the apostasy law, see The Pattern of the Convert-Martyr).

The authorities, the Life indicates, pressed Abo more than once and by more than one means — argument, the offer of pardon and favor, and the threat of torture and death — to abandon Christ and return to Islam (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976). The repeated pressure serves, in the narrative, to establish the freedom and firmness of Abo’s refusal: he is given every opportunity to save himself by a word, and he declines each time. The Life is careful to present the judge and the authorities as offering Abo a genuine way out; the martyrdom is not something done to a man who had no choice but something a man chose when he had a clear and repeated alternative (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976).

The Steadfast Refusal

Abo’s answer, as the tradition preserves it, was a settled and joyful refusal. He would not return to Islam; he would not renounce the Christ into whom he had been baptized; and he declared himself ready to suffer and to die rather than deny his Lord. The synaxarion tradition preserves his confession in the form: “I am prepared not only to be tortured for Christ, but to die for His sake” (OCA notice, oca.org, following the Life). Whether or not these are Abo’s exact words — they reach us through the hagiographer, and the collection treats reported ipsissima verba in an eighth-century Life with due caution (METHODOLOGY §3.5) — they faithfully render the substance the near-contemporary source attests: a convert who, offered his life for a word of denial, refused the word and accepted the death (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976).

The refusal is the confession, and it is what makes Abo a martyr in the strict sense — a witness (Greek martys) who seals his testimony with his blood. It is important, and the Life bears this out, that Abo’s steadfastness is presented as fidelity to Christ rather than as defiance of his people or their religion for its own sake. He does not curse Islam or revile the Arabs; he confesses Christ and declines to deny Him (see A Martyr for Christ, Not Against a People). The center of gravity is positive: not “I reject what you are” but “I will not deny Whom I have come to know.” This is the note the collection is at pains to keep, per METHODOLOGY §4, and it is faithful to the Life’s own emphasis (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976).

From Refusal to Sentence

With the refusal established and repeated, the legal outcome was fixed: under the apostasy law, an unrepentant apostate was liable to death, and Abo was condemned. The Life carries him from the final refusal to the sentence and its execution without softening either the reality of the choice offered him or the reality of the death that followed (Sabanisdze, Martyrdom of Abo, trans. Lang, 1976). That death — the beheading of 6 January 786, and what was done with his body afterward — is the subject of the next section. What the present file establishes is the ground on which the whole martyrdom stands: a free man, offered his life, chose Christ, and said so plainly, more than once, before those who held the power to kill him.

See Also

References

  • Ioane Sabanisdze. The Martyrdom of Abo, c. 786–790. Trans. David Marshall Lang, in Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints, 2nd ed., pp. 115–133. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1976.
  • Lang, David Marshall. Lives and Legends of the Georgian Saints. Introduction and apparatus to the Passion of Abo.
  • “Martyr Abo the Perfumer of Tbilisi, Georgia.” Orthodox Church in America, oca.org. (The imprisonment in fetters; the demand to recant; Abo’s confession of readiness to die.)