Relics and the Birthday of a Martyr

After the body of Polycarp had been burned and pierced, the Christians of Smyrna gathered his bones, “more precious than costly stones and more valuable than gold,” laid them in a fitting place, and resolved to assemble there year by year “in gladness and joy” to keep “the birthday of his martyrdom.” In those closing chapters the Martyrdom of Polycarp gives the earliest clear evidence we possess for two practices that would shape all subsequent Christian worship: the cult of the relics of the saints, and the annual commemoration of a martyr on the anniversary of his death. The same chapters articulate, with unusual care, the distinction between the worship owed to Christ alone and the love and honor given to His martyrs — the seed of the doctrine the Church would one day dogmatize at the Seventh Ecumenical Council.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Apostolic Father)

The Gathering of the Bones (Mart. Pol. 18)

When the fire had done its work and the executioner’s dagger had pierced the body, what remained of Polycarp was not abandoned but reverently collected. The Smyrnaeans, the Martyrdom records, “took up his bones, which are more valuable than precious stones and finer than refined gold, and laid them in a suitable place” (Mart. Pol. 18.2, trans. Holmes 2007; cf. ANF 1). The phrase is exact and arresting. The charred remains of an old man, a thing the surrounding culture would have regarded as ritually polluting and fit only for disposal, are here valued above gold and gems. The inversion is the whole point: in the eyes of the Church the bones of one who had died for Christ were the most precious of possessions, because they were the relics of a member of Christ who had been conformed to His Passion. This is the language of treasure, and it is applied to a corpse.

The reverence is matched by an intention to keep the remains gathered and accessible. The Smyrnaeans laid the bones “in a suitable place” and resolved that the Lord would permit them to come together there “in gladness and joy” to celebrate the anniversary (Mart. Pol. 18.2–3). The relics, in other words, are not merely preserved but enshrined and made the centre of a gathering — the embryonic form of the martyr’s tomb (memoria) around which later Christian devotion, and eventually the altar itself, would be built. The Martyrdom of Polycarp thus stands at the head of a development that runs straight through the catacombs and the martyria to the consecration of churches upon the relics of saints. What the later tradition elaborated, this text already assumes as natural: that the bodies of the martyrs are holy, and that their resting-places are gathering-places.

This is, so far as the surviving sources allow us to say, the earliest unambiguous Christian evidence for the cult of relics. There are earlier intimations elsewhere, but here for the first time the practice is described plainly and approvingly in a narrative of known date: the bones gathered, valued above gold, deposited in a chosen place, and made the focus of an annual assembly (Mart. Pol. 18; cf. Eusebius, HE 4.15, who transcribes the account and so transmits it to the wider Church). Because of this, the document occupies a foundational place in the history of Christian veneration, and the Orthodox tradition has rightly regarded it as a charter text for the honor paid to the saints’ relics (see Veneration, where the later development is set out).

The Heavenly Birthday: Dies Natalis (Mart. Pol. 18.3)

The annual gathering the Smyrnaeans resolved upon was to keep what the Martyrdom calls “the birthday of his martyrdom” — tēn genethlion … tou martyriou (Mart. Pol. 18.3, Greek text in Holmes 2007; trans. Holmes; cf. ANF 1). The phrase is the origin, in the Christian vocabulary, of the dies natalis of the saints, the “birthday” that is in fact the day of death. The logic is paradoxical only on the surface: for the martyr, the day of execution is not the end of life but the day of entry into eternal life, and so it is rightly called a birth — a birth into heaven. The earthly birthday is passed over in silence; the day the Church will keep is the day Polycarp died, because that is the day he was born to God. With this single word the Martyrdom gives the theological rationale for the entire later practice of commemorating saints on the anniversary of their repose rather than of their natural birth.

The purpose of the commemoration is stated with equal precision. The Smyrnaeans will gather “both in memory of those who have already contested, and for the training and preparation of those who are about to do so” (Mart. Pol. 18.3, trans. Holmes 2007; cf. ANF 1). The annual feast looks in two directions at once: backward, in grateful memory of the martyrs already crowned, and forward, as the formation of those who may yet be called to the same witness. The commemoration is thus not mere remembrance but catechesis — the keeping of the martyr’s day is a means by which the Church trains its members in the willingness to confess. This double rationale, memory and preparation, is precisely the function the cult of the saints would serve throughout Christian history.

It is difficult to overstate the consequence of this passage. The annual keeping of a martyr’s death-day, gathered around his relics, with thanksgiving and the proclamation of his witness, is the seed from which the entire liturgical calendar of the saints grew. From the local commemoration of Polycarp at Smyrna there developed, in time, the martyrologies, the synaxaria, and the menologia — the calendar in which every day of the Orthodox year is the feast of some saint or martyr. The Martyrdom of Polycarp shows that calendar in its first, simplest form: one community, one martyr, one day, kept year by year at the place where his bones were laid (Mart. Pol. 18; cf. Lightfoot 1885, who traces the development of the martyr-festival from this text). The structure of the Church’s year of saints is here in its embryo.

Worship and Veneration: The Proto-Statement (Mart. Pol. 17)

Embedded in the same chapters is one of the most theologically important sentences the early Church produced on the subject of devotion to the saints — a careful distinction, set down before any controversy compelled it, between the worship due to Christ and the love and honor given to the martyrs. The author of the Martyrdom anticipates the suspicion that the Christians might come to worship Polycarp in the place of Christ, and forestalls it: they could never, he insists, forsake Christ “who suffered for the salvation of those who are saved in the whole world” in order to worship any other. “For we worship this one, who is the Son of God, but the martyrs we love as disciples and imitators of the Lord, as they deserve, on account of their unsurpassable devotion to their own King and Teacher” (Mart. Pol. 17.2–3, trans. Holmes 2007; cf. ANF 1).

The distinction is precise and is registered in the Greek itself. To Christ alone belongs latreia — worship, the adoration owed to God; to the martyrs belongs love and honor (agapē, the affection due to “disciples and imitators of the Lord”). The two are not different degrees of one thing but different kinds: one is the worship of the Creator, the other the honoring of His servants for the sake of their devotion to Him. This is the substance of what later Orthodox theology would formalize as the difference between latreia, reserved for God, and the timē or veneration (and, in the case of icons, proskynēsis) offered to the saints. That the distinction is already drawn, explicitly and without controversy, in a document of c. 155/156 is of the first importance: it shows that the honoring of the saints arose within the Church hand in hand with a clear sense that such honor is categorically distinct from the worship of God, and was never understood as a rival to it (Mart. Pol. 17; cf. Eusebius, HE 4.15).

This proto-statement stands at the head of a long trajectory. The principle the Smyrnaeans articulated in passing — worship for Christ, love and honor for His martyrs — would become, six centuries later, the dogmatic basis of the Orthodox defense of the veneration of icons and relics at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787, which distinguished the relative honor (timētikē proskynēsis) paid to holy images and saints from the true worship (latreia) due to the divine nature alone. The Council did not invent the distinction; it defended one already present in the most ancient practice of the Church, of which the Martyrdom of Polycarp is among the earliest witnesses. The line from Smyrna to Nicaea II is direct, and the later Church was conscious of standing on this foundation (see Veneration, where the dogmatic development is treated; on the pre-schism Church within which it unfolded, see the Orthodoxy Guide).

The Attempt to Withhold the Body (Mart. Pol. 17)

The narrative does not present the gathering of the relics as a simple or unopposed act, and the opposition it records is itself significant. According to the Martyrdom, the adversary — “the jealous and envious Evil One” — worked to prevent the Christians from taking up even the body, prompting some to suggest to the magistrate that he should not hand the corpse over, “lest they abandon the crucified one and begin to worship this man” (Mart. Pol. 17.1–2, trans. Holmes 2007; cf. ANF 1). The text names the instigators: it was at the prompting of certain parties, the Martyrdom says, and singles out the hostility of the crowd and “especially the Jews,” who had already been forward in calling for Polycarp’s death and in gathering wood for the pyre, that the centurion was moved to place the body in the fire and burn it, so that the Smyrnaeans could recover only the bones (Mart. Pol. 13; 17–18, trans. Holmes 2007; cf. ANF 1).

These details belong to the text as its own claims, and are reported here as such rather than asserted as independently established fact (cf. METHODOLOGY §3.5 on the handling of a source’s polemical and supernatural assertions). The Martyrdom is a document of its moment, and its attribution of motive to the crowd and to the Jews of Smyrna reflects the rhetoric and the tensions of second-century Asia Minor as the author understood them; the historical weight of these particular charges is assessed elsewhere (see The Account Assessed). What is theologically notable, and what the author plainly intends, is the irony: the very attempt to prevent any cult of Polycarp — the burning of the body so that nothing should remain to be honored — produced instead the relics that the Smyrnaeans gathered as “more precious than gold.” The effort to forestall veneration became the occasion of its first clear instance. The bones could only be collected because the body had been burned; the attempt to leave nothing left precisely the relics the Church would treasure.

The Founding of a Pattern

Taken together, the closing chapters of the Martyrdom of Polycarp do far more than narrate the disposal of a body. They establish a pattern. The reverent gathering of the relics, their deposition in a chosen place, the resolve to assemble there annually, the naming of the death-day as a “birthday,” the double purpose of memory and preparation, and the careful guarding of the line between the worship of Christ and the honor of His servant — these are the constituent elements of the Christian cult of the saints, and they appear here together, in a single text, at the very edge of the apostolic age (Mart. Pol. 17–18, trans. Holmes 2007; cf. ANF 1; Lightfoot 1885). What the later Church developed in detail, the Smyrnaeans of c. 155/156 already practiced in substance.

For the Orthodox tradition the document is therefore a charter, and is read as such. The veneration of relics, the keeping of saints’ days on the anniversary of repose, and the doctrine of the distinction between worship and honor are not later accretions imposed upon a simpler primitive faith; they are visible in the oldest surviving martyr-account, arising spontaneously among Christians who had known Polycarp and who buried his bones. The Martyrdom shows the Church remembering its first martyrs in the only way it knew — by treasuring their relics and keeping their day — and explaining, even as it did so, exactly what that honor was and was not. The bishop who could tell the proconsul that his King had never wronged him in eighty-six years (see Eighty-Six Years) gave the Church, in his death and burial, the first clear shape of the calendar of the saints.

References

Holmes, Michael W., ed. and trans. The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007. (Critical Greek text and translation of the Martyrdom of Polycarp; the gathering of the bones “more valuable than precious stones,” 18.2; the “birthday of his martyrdom,” 18.3; the worship/love distinction, 17.2–3; the attempt to withhold the body, 17.1–2.)
Lightfoot, J. B. The Apostolic Fathers, Part II: S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1885. (Text, translation, and commentary; on the martyr-festival and the development of the cult of relics from this text.)
The Encyclical Epistle of the Church at Smyrna concerning the Martyrdom of the Holy Polycarp. In The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1. Ed. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson. (The ANF translation cited throughout.)
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History (Historia Ecclesiastica) 4.15. (Eusebius’s transcription of the Martyrdom, by which the account of the relics and the commemoration was transmitted to the wider Church.)
Martyrium Polycarpi, Greek text in J.-P. Migne, Patrologia Graeca 5. (The traditional printed Greek edition, superseded for critical purposes by Holmes and Lightfoot.)
The Second Council of Nicaea (787), Definition (Horos) on the holy images. (The dogmatic articulation of the distinction between latreia and the veneration of saints and their relics, anticipated in Mart. Pol. 17.)