Hieromartyr 5th century

Hieromartyr Abdas of Persia & Companions

died c. 420

Also known as Abdias · Obadiah, with Hormizd and Sunin

A bishop in Persia martyred with his companions in the persecution of the Church of the East (c. 420)

Feast Day

September 5

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Commemorated as

The Holy Hieromartyr Abdas, Bishop of Persia, and Those Martyred With Him

Life

Abdas was a Christian bishop in Persia, commemorated together with the martyrs who suffered with him during the persecution of the Church of the East under the Sasanian king Yazdegerd I (399–420). The synaxarion remembers him as a bishop adorned with many virtues whose confession of faith precipitated a long and bloody persecution of Persian Christians. In the Eastern Orthodox calendar he is commemorated on September 5, where he is joined by the martyrs Hormizd and Sunin.

By tradition, Abdas destroyed a Persian fire-temple — a pyreum, the shrine in which the Zoroastrians venerated the sacred fire. Yazdegerd I, who for much of his reign had been tolerant toward Christians, ordered the bishop to rebuild the temple. Abdas refused, declining to restore a place of worship he regarded as idolatrous. The king then warned that he would destroy the Christian churches if the bishop would not comply; when Abdas held firm, Yazdegerd ordered his execution and commanded that churches be destroyed throughout the Persian territories.

The bishop's refusal and death opened a wave of persecution that the sources describe as lasting some thirty years, continuing under Yazdegerd's successor Bahram V (420–438) and later kings. Abdas himself was put to death after torture, and many other clergy and faithful were martyred in the same period. The events were recorded by early Church historians, including Socrates of Constantinople and Theodoret of Cyrrhus, who set the destruction of the fire-temple and its consequences around 419–420.

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The fire-temple and the persecution

The immediate occasion of the martyrdom, as the sources relate it, was the demolition of a Zoroastrian fire-temple in which Abdas was involved. To the Persian authorities the fire was an object of religious veneration, and the destruction of its shrine was treated as an offense against the kingdom itself. When summoned, the bishop refused to rebuild what he held to be no house of God. The historians frame the dispute as one of conscience: Abdas would not raise again a temple to the fire even to save himself or to spare the churches.

His execution was, by the sources' account, the first of many. Yazdegerd's order to destroy the Christian churches and to persecute and torture the faithful turned a single confrontation into a sustained campaign. The persecution is associated in later commemorations with a number of companions and fellow-sufferers; the names handed down vary across the calendars, and the synaxarion that underlies the September 5 commemoration joins to Abdas the martyrs Hormizd and Sunin.

Commemoration and identity

Abdas is commemorated in the Orthodox calendar on September 5, and the same Persian bishop appears in other recensions on March 31 and May 16, where he is variously styled Audas or Avdas and grouped with other Persian martyrs, including the deacon Benjamin. The sources differ on details of his see — it is given variously as Susa, Bethchasar, or Hormizd-Ardashir — and on the precise year of his death, which is placed around 418 to 420. These variations reflect the several calendars and chronicles through which his memory passed rather than separate persons.

Sources: Synaxarion