The Finding of 415

In December AD 415 a priest named Lucian, serving the village of Caphar Gamala near Jerusalem, reported that the rabban Gamaliel had appeared to him in a series of nocturnal visions and revealed the burial place of the protomartyr Stephen, along with that of Gamaliel himself, his son Abibas, and Nicodemus. The relics were uncovered and solemnly translated to the church of Holy Zion in Jerusalem. The whole tradition rests on Lucian’s own account, the Epistola Luciani, translated into Latin by the presbyter Avitus of Braga. This file sets out the inventio and its sources.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Protomartyr)

A Forgotten Grave

Acts records only that “devout men buried Stephen and made great lamentation over him” (Acts 8:2); it does not say where. For nearly four centuries the location of the protomartyr’s tomb was, so far as the record shows, unknown — a silence consistent with the general loss of the burial places of the apostolic age during the persecutions. The recovery of Stephen’s relics belongs to the great age of the inventio of saints’ relics in the late fourth and early fifth centuries — the same era that produced Ambrose’s discovery of Gervasius and Protasius at Milan (386) and the rising cult of the saints across the empire (Peter Brown, The Cult of the Saints, 1981; and on the doctrine of relics, Icons and Iconoclasm treats the wider veneration). The finding of Stephen’s bones in 415 is among the most famous and best-documented of these discoveries, precisely because the man who reported it left a written account.

Lucian’s Visions

The source for the discovery is the report of Lucian (Lucianus), a presbyter of Caphar Gamala (Kafr Gamala), a village on the road north of Jerusalem. According to his account, on a Friday night in December 415 he was granted the first of three visions in which an aged, dignified man “of tall stature, with a long beard,” dressed in white with gold-set gems and a gold rod in his hand, appeared and identified himself as Gamaliel — the rabban who had taught Saul (Acts 22:3) and who, in this tradition, had secretly become a Christian. Gamaliel told Lucian that he and the protomartyr Stephen, together with Gamaliel’s son Abibas (Abibon) and Nicodemus (the Nicodemus of John’s Gospel), lay buried in the field at Caphar Gamala, and bade him go to the bishop of Jerusalem so that the relics might be honorably translated (Epistola Luciani 2–6; PL 41:809–814). The visions, on Lucian’s telling, were repeated to confirm them, and the locations within the field were specified.

This narrative is reported here as the claim of the Epistola Luciani — Lucian’s own first-person account of what he says he was shown — and not as independently established fact, in keeping with METHODOLOGY §3.5. The vision-narrative, the identification of the other three graves, and the conversation with Gamaliel are the substance of the source, and the source is a single, interested, first-person report; its character as such is part of the historical record (and is weighed in The Historical Questions).

The Uncovering and the Translation

Lucian, his account continues, reported the visions to John, bishop of Jerusalem (John II), who came with two other bishops to the indicated field. When the spot was opened, the relics were found, and — the source reports — the moment of discovery was accompanied by an earthquake and a great fragrance, and by the healing of a crowd of the sick who were present (Epistola Luciani 8–9; PL 41:815–817). The bones of Stephen were taken up and translated with solemnity to the church on Mount Zion in Jerusalem, the mother church of the city, on (by the tradition) 26 December 415 — the day that would be kept in the East as the synaxis in his honor following his feast, and which fixed December 26 as the protomartyr’s day in much of the West (see The Feast and the Nativity Octave). The principal relics remained at Jerusalem, but portions were at once detached for distribution — the practice of dividing relics being by this date well established — and these fragments began the rapid westward journey that would carry the protomartyr’s cult across the Mediterranean within a few years (see The Cult and the Miracles).

Avitus and Orosius: The Text Goes West

The transmission of the account and of the relics to the Latin world ran through two named figures, both connected to the Spanish church. Avitus of Braga, a Spanish priest then resident in Jerusalem, translated Lucian’s Greek report into Latin — the form in which the Epistola Luciani survives and by which it became known in the West (PL 41:807–818; the prefatory letter of Avitus accompanies the text). Avitus entrusted the Latin translation, together with relics of Stephen, to Paulus Orosius — the Spanish presbyter and historian, author of the Seven Books of History Against the Pagans, who had come east in 415 to consult Augustine and Jerome on the Pelagian and Priscillianist questions. Orosius, returning westward later in 415–416, carried the Epistola and relics of Stephen toward Spain; prevented by the unsettled state of Spain from reaching his homeland, he deposited relics on the African coast — at the island of Minorca and in North Africa — where they precipitated notable events (the forced conversion of the Jews of Minorca in 418, recorded in the Epistola Severi, followed the arrival of Stephen’s relics there; Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage, 1982, 212–220; Clark, “Claims on the Bones of Saint Stephen,” 1982). It is through Orosius’s carrying of the relics and the text that Stephen’s bones reached Augustine’s Africa, with the consequences recorded in City of God 22.8.

The Dating

The dating of the inventio to December 415 is secured by the convergence of the Epistola Luciani’s own indications with the firmly dated movements of Orosius (whose journey east in 415 and the council of Diospolis of December 415 anchor the chronology) and with Augustine’s testimony that the relics reached Africa only “a few years” before he wrote City of God 22 (c. 425–426), having arrived there from 416 onward (Hunt, Holy Land Pilgrimage, 1982, 211–220). The consensus places the discovery in December 415 and the first arrival of relics in Africa in 416. [Disputed: the historical character of the *inventio* of 415. The event itself — that relics were "found" at Caphar Gamala in 415 and translated to Zion — is firmly attested and dated. Its supernatural framing (Lucian's visions, the identification of the bones as Stephen's, the accompanying wonders) is the claim of the *Epistola Luciani*, a single interested source, and is treated by historians as hagiography rather than verifiable fact; some scholars (e.g., E. A. Clark, 1982) further situate the discovery within the rivalries of Jerusalem ecclesiastical politics and the patronage of powerful women such as Melania the Younger and the empress Eudocia. The relic-cult's existence and rapid spread are historical; the discovery-narrative's miraculous content is pinned to its source]. What is beyond doubt is the consequence: from December 415 the protomartyr, four centuries silent in an unknown grave, became one of the most widely venerated saints of the Mediterranean world.

References

Epistola Luciani (Revelatio Sancti Stephani), trans. Avitus of Braga. PL 41:807–818. (Lucian’s visions of Gamaliel; the uncovering; the translation to Zion; the prefatory letter of Avitus.)
The Holy Bible — Acts 8:2; 22:3; John 3:1–10; 19:39. Cited by book chapter:verse.
Augustine of Hippo. City of God 22.8. Trans. Marcus Dods, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 2. (The arrival of the relics in Africa.)
Hunt, E. D. Holy Land Pilgrimage in the Later Roman Empire, AD 312–460. Oxford: Clarendon, 1982. (The inventio, Avitus, Orosius, and the dating.)
Clark, Elizabeth A. “Claims on the Bones of Saint Stephen: The Partisans of Melania and Eudocia.” Church History 51 (1982): 141–156. (The ecclesiastical politics of the discovery.)