The Martyrium Polycarpi

The Martyrdom of Polycarp is a letter sent by the church of Smyrna to the church of Philomelium — and through it “to all the congregations of the holy and catholic Church everywhere” — recounting the arrest, trial, and burning of the aged bishop Polycarp. It is the earliest surviving Christian martyr-act outside the New Testament and the prototype of the whole subsequent genre, and it frames Polycarp’s death deliberately as “a martyrdom in accord with the gospel.” This file establishes what the document is, how it tells its story, and how its reported wonders stand in the text as the Smyrnaeans’ own claims; the assessment of its historical reliability and textual integrity is reserved for the companion study.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

What the Document Is

The work conventionally titled the Martyrdom of Polycarp (Latin Martyrium Polycarpi) is not a detached biography or a later hagiographer’s vita but a genuine letter: it opens with the epistolary address of “the church of God that sojourns at Smyrna to the church of God that sojourns in Philomelium and to all the congregations of the holy and catholic Church in every place” (Martyrdom of Polycarp, salutation; trans. Holmes 2007). The named recipient, Philomelium in Phrygia, had evidently written asking for an account of the recent persecution, and the surviving text is the answer — a circular letter intended to be copied and passed from church to church, which is precisely what happened to it (Martyrdom of Polycarp 20; Lightfoot 1885). The document is thus an act of the early Church’s communion: one local church reporting to another, and to the whole, the death of its bishop.

Within the literature of early Christianity the letter occupies a position of the first importance. It is the earliest Christian martyr-act — the earliest narrative devoted to the suffering and death of a named martyr — that survives outside the canonical Acts and the Apocalypse, and it stands at the head of the genre of the acta and passiones of the martyrs that would flourish for centuries (Holmes 2007, introduction to the Martyrdom; Hartog 2013). Where the letters of Ignatius show us a martyr writing on his way to death, the Smyrnaean letter shows us a community writing about a death already accomplished, and in doing so it created the literary form by which the Church would remember its witnesses (on the Apostolic Fathers as a corpus, see The Church Fathers).

The letter belongs to the world of the pre-Constantinian Church of Roman Asia, the same world of converging local churches that produced the Ignatian correspondence a generation earlier (see The Bond; on the period, Pre-Schism Church). It is the document in which the Church first articulates, in narrative form, what it means to die as a Christian — and that articulation is governed throughout by a single controlling idea: the conformity of the martyr’s death to the death of Christ.

“A Martyrdom According to the Gospel”

The letter announces its own theme at the outset. Its purpose, the Smyrnaeans say, is to set before the churches “the things concerning those who were martyred and especially the blessed Polycarp,” whose witness “put a stop to the persecution by, as it were, setting a seal upon it” — and they describe his death as having taken place “in accord with the gospel” (Martyrdom of Polycarp 1.1; trans. Holmes 2007). The phrase kata to euangelion, “according to the gospel,” is the interpretive key the document hands to its readers. The whole point of recounting Polycarp’s end is that “nearly everything that led up to it happened so that the Lord might show us from above a martyrdom in accord with the gospel” (Martyrdom of Polycarp 1.1; Holmes 2007; Lightfoot 1885). The letter returns to the theme at its climax, where it calls Polycarp’s martyrdom “extraordinary” precisely because it was patterned on the gospel of Christ (Martyrdom of Polycarp 19.1; Holmes 2007).

This framing is worked out in a sustained series of deliberate parallels between Polycarp’s passion and the Passion of the Lord. The letter underlines that, like Christ, Polycarp “waited to be betrayed, just as the Lord did, that we too might be imitators of him” (Martyrdom of Polycarp 1.2; Holmes 2007). He is betrayed by members of his own household — servants who, under torture, give him up (Martyrdom of Polycarp 6.1) — and the police captain charged with arresting him bears the name Herod, while his father is named Nicetes (Martyrdom of Polycarp 6.2, 8.2; Holmes 2007). The narrative has Polycarp enter the city mounted, recalling the entry into Jerusalem, and stages his arrest and trial so as to echo the gospel at every turn (Martyrdom of Polycarp 7–8; Lightfoot 1885). The Smyrnaeans are not concealing this patterning but foregrounding it, because for them the conformity of the death to Christ’s is what makes it a Christian martyrdom and not a mere execution (Martyrdom of Polycarp 1.1–2, 19.1; Holmes 2007).

The Quintus Episode and the Refusal of Volunteers

Before it reaches Polycarp the letter pauses on a counter-example, and the pause is theologically loaded. It tells of a Phrygian named Quintus, who had come forward of his own accord and had pressed others to give themselves up to the authorities — and who, when he actually saw the wild beasts, lost his nerve, was persuaded by the proconsul to swear the oath and offer sacrifice, and apostatized (Martyrdom of Polycarp 4; trans. Holmes 2007). The letter draws the lesson without hesitation: “For this reason, therefore, brothers, we do not praise those who hand themselves over, since the gospel does not so teach” (Martyrdom of Polycarp 4; Holmes 2007; Lightfoot 1885).

This is one of the document’s most important theological statements, easily missed under the weight of the wonders that follow. The earliest martyr-act in the Church’s possession is also, explicitly, a warning against volunteering for martyrdom. The true martyr, in the letter’s understanding, does not seek out death or provoke the authorities; he waits, like the Lord, to be sought and betrayed, and accepts the death that comes (Martyrdom of Polycarp 1.2, 4; Holmes 2007). Polycarp himself models this: he does not surrender himself but withdraws, and submits only when he is found (Martyrdom of Polycarp 5–7). The Quintus episode thus stands as the letter’s deliberate guard-rail, distinguishing the gospel pattern of martyrdom from a reckless self-offering the Smyrnaean church refuses to praise.

The Narrative Arc

With the theme set, the letter follows the events in order. Persecution breaks out at Smyrna, and the earlier martyrs — among them a certain Germanicus, who pulled the beast upon himself — endure torments with a constancy the letter attributes to the grace of Christ (Martyrdom of Polycarp 2–3; Holmes 2007). When the crowd in the arena begins to call for Polycarp by name, the old bishop is persuaded by his people to withdraw to a small farm outside the city, where he spends his time in prayer (Martyrdom of Polycarp 5.1; Holmes 2007). There, three days before his arrest, he has a vision while praying: he sees his pillow burning with fire, and turns to those with him and says, “I must be burned alive” (Martyrdom of Polycarp 5.2; trans. Holmes 2007) — which the letter offers as a prophetic foreshadowing of the manner of his death.

Betrayed by servants under torture, Polycarp is tracked to a farmhouse; rather than flee again he says, “May God’s will be done,” comes down to meet the police, and orders food and drink set before his captors while he asks for an hour to pray (Martyrdom of Polycarp 7; Holmes 2007). As he enters the stadium, the letter records, “a voice came to Polycarp from heaven: ‘Be strong, Polycarp, and act like a man’” (Martyrdom of Polycarp 9.1; trans. Holmes 2007), adding that no one saw the speaker but that the brethren present heard the voice. Before the proconsul Polycarp is pressed to save himself by swearing “by the fortune of Caesar” and reviling Christ; he refuses, answering that for eighty-six years he has served Christ, who has done him no wrong — “how can I blaspheme my King who saved me?” (Martyrdom of Polycarp 9.3; Holmes 2007). When ordered to cry “Away with the atheists!” against the Christians, Polycarp instead looks up at the heathen crowd, gestures toward them, and turns the cry back on them (Martyrdom of Polycarp 9.2; Holmes 2007; Lightfoot 1885). The proconsul threatens fire; Polycarp answers that the proconsul’s fire burns for an hour and is soon quenched, but that he is ignorant of the fire of the judgment to come (Martyrdom of Polycarp 11; Holmes 2007). The crowd then demands his burning, and the letter notes pointedly that “the Jews” were especially zealous in gathering wood and inciting the proceedings (Martyrdom of Polycarp 12–13; Holmes 2007). (This hostile-crowd motif, including its problems, is treated in The Account Assessed.)

When the pyre is ready, Polycarp asks not to be nailed but only bound, saying that the One who grants him to endure the fire will grant him to remain at the stake unmoved; so they bind him “as a noble ram out of a great flock, prepared for an offering, a whole burnt offering acceptable to God” (Martyrdom of Polycarp 14.1; trans. Holmes 2007). There follows the long prayer at the stake — a doxology shaped after the eucharistic thanksgiving, in which Polycarp blesses God for counting him worthy to share “the cup of Christ” and to be received as “a rich and acceptable sacrifice,” and ends with a Trinitarian glorification (Martyrdom of Polycarp 14.1–3; Holmes 2007; Lightfoot 1885). The placing of this prayer at the center of the narrative is the letter’s way of saying that the martyr’s death is itself an act of worship (on the sacrificial and liturgical reading of his death, see Relics and the Birthday of a Martyr).

The Reported Wonders

What the letter reports next has made it famous and has made it a test case for how the Church reads its own narratives. These elements must be received as what they are — the claims of the Smyrnaean letter, reported by it as what its writers and witnesses say happened, not as facts the present account independently asserts (METHODOLOGY §3.5). The letter is the source; the wonders are its testimony.

When the fire was kindled, the Smyrnaean letter reports, the flame did not consume the bishop’s body in the ordinary way: it “made the shape of a vault, like a ship’s sail filled by the wind, and made a wall around the body of the martyr,” so that he stood in the midst not as burning flesh “but as bread baking, or as gold and silver being refined in a furnace,” and a fragrance came forth to those present “as the scent of incense or of some other costly spice” (Martyrdom of Polycarp 15.1–2; trans. Holmes 2007; Lightfoot 1885). The imagery is deliberate — the baking bread and the refined gold and silver are eucharistic and scriptural figures — and the letter presents the fire’s refusal to burn and the sweet smell as signs of God’s favor toward His servant.

Because the fire did not kill him, the letter continues, the lawless ones ordered an executioner (a confector) to come up and stab him with a dagger; and when he did so, “there came out [a dove and] a great quantity of blood, so that it extinguished the fire, and the whole crowd was amazed that there should be so great a difference between the unbelievers and the elect” (Martyrdom of Polycarp 16.1; trans. Holmes 2007). The dove issuing from the wound, the quantity of blood, and the quenching of the fire by that blood are, again, reported by the Smyrnaean letter as its testimony to the wonder of Polycarp’s death. The detail of the dove, however, is textually insecure and has been doubted since the nineteenth century: [Disputed: the words "a dove and" at 16.1 are absent from Eusebius's reproduction of the passage in *HE* 4.15 and are uncertain in the manuscript tradition; Lightfoot (1885) proposed that the text originally read *ep' aristera* ("on the left side") and was corrupted into *peristera* ("a dove"), while others judge the dove a later devotional interpolation magnifying the martyr (cf. the Spirit descending as a dove), and still others retain the reading as original]. The point for an Orthodox reader is not to adjudicate the textual crux here but to see that the letter’s claim and its transmission are both part of the record (the fuller textual discussion is in The Account Assessed).

The Relics and the Birthday of the Martyr

The closing narrative turns to the body. The letter reports that the centurion, when the authorities and the hostile crowd objected to releasing the corpse, had it placed in the fire and burned, after which the Christians “took up his bones, which are more valuable than precious stones and finer than refined gold, and put them in a suitable place” (Martyrdom of Polycarp 18.2; trans. Holmes 2007; Lightfoot 1885). There, the Smyrnaeans say, the Lord will permit them to gather “to celebrate the birthday of his martyrdom” — the genethlia, the heavenly birthday — both in memory of those who have already contended and for the training of those to come (Martyrdom of Polycarp 18.3; Holmes 2007). The letter is careful to distinguish this veneration of the martyr from the worship due to Christ alone: the Christians worship Christ as Son of God, but love the martyrs “as disciples and imitators of the Lord” (Martyrdom of Polycarp 17.3; Holmes 2007). These chapters are the earliest documentary witness to the cult of relics and the keeping of a martyr’s feast-day, and they are treated in their own place (see Relics and the Birthday of a Martyr; on the “eighty-six years” and the theology of witness, Eighty-Six Years).

The Date and the Colophon

The letter dates the martyrdom by the local calendar and the Roman magistracy: Polycarp was taken “on the day of the great Sabbath,” and the events fell under the high-priesthood of Philip of Tralles and the proconsulship of Statius Quadratus (Martyrdom of Polycarp 21; trans. Holmes 2007). These data have been used to fix the death to 23 February of 155 or 156 on one reckoning and to the 160s on another; the question is genuinely contested and is resolved, so far as it can be, in its own section (see The Date of the Martyrdom). After a doxology the letter adds a chain of subscriptions describing how the text was copied and handed on — from Polycarp’s disciples through a certain Gaius, then Socrates (or Isocrates) of Corinth, and finally one Pionius, who says he recovered the worn copy through a revelation of Polycarp himself (Martyrdom of Polycarp 22; and the Moscow-manuscript colophon; Lightfoot 1885; Holmes 2007). This colophon is itself a precious witness to how a sub-apostolic document survived, and its bearing on the text’s integrity is examined in the companion file (see The Account Assessed; on the wider transmission, Modern Scholarship).

References

Holmes, Michael W., ed. and trans. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. (Greek text and translation of the Martyrdom of Polycarp, chapters 1–22, with introduction; the salutation to Philomelium; “according to the gospel” at 1.1 and 19.1; the Quintus episode at 4; the vision of the burning pillow at 5.2; “Be strong, Polycarp” at 9.1; the eighty-six-years confession at 9.3; the prayer at 14; the pyre, fragrance, and refining imagery at 15; the dove-and-blood at 16.1; the relics and birthday at 17–18; the dating and colophon at 21–22.)
Lightfoot, J. B. The Apostolic Fathers, Part II: S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp. 2 vols. London: Macmillan, 1885. (Critical text, translation, and commentary; the ep’ aristera / peristera proposal for 16.1; the Pionian colophon and manuscript tradition; the chronology of Statius Quadratus.)
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History (HE) 4.15. (Reproduces the greater part of the Martyrdom of Polycarp; its text omits “a dove and” at 16.1.)
The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 1. Ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. (English translation of the Martyrdom of Polycarp.)
Hartog, Paul. Polycarp’s Epistle to the Philippians and the Martyrdom of Polycarp: Introduction, Text, and Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. (Edition and commentary; the Martyrdom as the earliest and prototypical martyr-act.)