Martyrs Acepsimus, Joseph, Aithalas

The Great Persecution in Persia

In the middle of the fourth century, while the Roman Empire had begun to favor the Church, Christians living under the Sasanian king Shapur II suffered one of the longest persecutions in Christian history. Suspected of loyalty to Rome and charged with refusing to worship the sun and fire, bishops, clergy, monks and lay faithful were put to death across the Persian realm for nearly forty years.¹ Acepsimas, Joseph and Aithalas are counted among the last martyrs of that persecution. The historian Sozomen, writing in the fifth century, names Acepsimas among the bishops who gave their lives for Christ in Persia, and their sufferings were preserved in Syriac in the collection known as the Acts of the Persian Martyrs.²

Arrest and Imprisonment

Acepsimas was bishop of Hnaita, a district in the mountains of Adiabene, east of the Tigris, and was already about eighty years old. His flock loved him for his ascetic life and his untiring care as a shepherd. When the king’s officers came for him, the Christians of his town wished to follow him, but he sent them home and went with his captors to Arbela, the modern Erbil.³ Before the governor, he refused to call the sun a god, marveling that anyone would worship a creature in place of the Creator. He was stretched on the ground, beaten until his body ran with blood, and thrown into prison.

With him were brought Joseph, a presbyter of about seventy, and Aithalas, a deacon of about sixty, who were beaten in the same way and joined him in chains. According to the Greek synaxarion, the three were held in prison for three years, suffering hunger, thirst and repeated torture, yet they would not renounce Christ.⁴

Their Martyrdom

The accounts differ in detail. The Greek tradition relates that the king himself, visiting a fire temple near Arbela, had the prisoners brought before him, and that when they again confessed Christ, Acepsimas was beheaded, Joseph was stoned in the city over many hours, and Aithalas was stoned at a nearby village.⁵ The Syriac acts place the death of Acepsimas under torture in 376, and the stoning of Joseph and Aithalas in 377 or 378 at other places, with apostate Christians forced to throw the stones. Both traditions agree that the old men endured to the end with remarkable patience.⁶

The synaxarion adds that guards were posted to keep the Christians from taking the body of Joseph, but on the fourth night a violent storm broke over the place, the guards fled, and the body was carried away. It also tells that a tree grew on the grave of Aithalas, and that its leaves and fruit brought healing to the sick. These details are traditional.⁷ The Church honors the three together on November 3, as a bishop, a presbyter and a deacon who together gave a complete witness of the clergy of a persecuted church.