Commontide
Ecumenical Commemoration
Bishop & Martyr
February 23 · d. 155
also known as Polycarp of Smyrna, Polycarp, St. Polycarp
Polycarp was bishop of Smyrna in the generation after the apostles, a hearer of men who had seen the Lord, and a correspondent of Ignatius of Antioch. His one surviving letter, written to the Philippians, is woven almost entirely out of apostolic words. He was burned in the stadium of his own city, an old man who answered the proconsul that he had served Christ eighty-six years and could not blaspheme his King.
Polycarp was an old man when the crowd in the stadium at Smyrna called for him by name. He had been their bishop for as long as most of them could remember, appointed, so Irenaeus tells us, by apostles in Asia, and he could speak of John and of others who had seen the Lord as men he had listened to himself.
When the search for him began, Polycarp withdrew to a farm outside the city and prayed through the night. A servant was tortured until he told where the old man was. They found him lying down in the upper room of a small house, and there was still a way out of it into another place, but he would not take it. "The will of God be done," he said. Then he ordered food and drink set before the men who had come to arrest him, and asked for an hour to pray undisturbed. Some of them were sorry they had come after so venerable an old man.
In the stadium the proconsul urged him to have respect to his own age, to swear by the fortune of Caesar, to say "Away with the Atheists," which is what the crowd called the Christians. Polycarp looked at the crowd, waved his hand at them, groaned, looked up to heaven, and said it: "Away with the Atheists." Swear and I will let you go, the proconsul said; curse Christ. And Polycarp answered, in the words the Ante-Nicene Fathers translators give us, "Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me any injury: how then can I blaspheme my King and my Saviour?" That is not the courage of a moment. It is the arithmetic of a whole life, offered as the reason he cannot do what is asked.
Pressed again, he said, "I am a Christian. And if you wish to learn what the doctrines of Christianity are, appoint me a day, and thou shalt hear them." He would give an account to the magistrate, because the powers are ordained of God and owed their honour; he would give none to the mob. Threatened with wild beasts, he said to call them. Threatened with fire, he said, "Thou threatenest me with fire which burneth for an hour, and after a little is extinguished, but art ignorant of the fire of the coming judgment and of eternal punishment, reserved for the ungodly. But why tarriest thou? Bring forth what thou wilt."
They bound him rather than nailing him, and he prayed with his hands behind him: "I give Thee thanks that Thou hast counted me, worthy of this day and this hour, that I should have a part in the number of Thy martyrs, in the cup of thy Christ, to the resurrection of eternal life." The church of Smyrna, writing the story down for the church at Philomelium, reports that the fire arched round him like the sail of a ship filled with the wind and did not consume him, and that an executioner had to be sent in with a dagger.
His own people were not allowed to have the body whole; it was burned. So they gathered up the bones, which they called "more precious than the most exquisite jewels, and more purified than gold," and laid them somewhere they could come back to, and they kept the anniversary of the day. They called it his birthday. That is where the keeping of a saint's day begins in the surviving record, and it begins here because a congregation would not let go of an old man who had not let go of his King.
You will probably never be asked to deny Christ in a stadium. But notice what Polycarp's answer actually rests on. He does not say he is brave, or ready, or certain; he says he has served this King eighty-six years and been done no injury in all of them, and that this is why the thing being asked of him is unthinkable. The refusal is the last item in a very long ledger, and it was decided by the entries before it, the ones nobody watched. What has your own long acquaintance with God taught you about his character, and what would that knowledge make unthinkable for you tomorrow?
Polycarp is unusually well served by his sources, and it is worth saying which they are, because almost everything vivid about him reaches us through someone else's eyes.
His own hand survives in one letter, to the Philippians, forwarding the letters of Ignatius at the Philippians' request and speaking of Ignatius as already dead and glorified. Ignatius himself is the earliest external witness: writing under guard around 107 to 110 on his way to Rome, he addresses Polycarp as "Bishop of the Church of the Smyrnaeans," which places the episcopate in Polycarp's own lifetime by a contemporary hand. The death is narrated in the Martyrdom of Polycarp, a letter from the church of Smyrna to the church at Philomelium; it is not Polycarp's writing but a community's account of him, and it is the fullest early martyr narrative outside Scripture. Irenaeus, writing about 180, had heard Polycarp as a boy and supplies the apostolic appointment at Smyrna, the visit to Rome, and the exchange with Marcion; in a letter to Florinus, preserved only as a fragment quoted by Eusebius, he says he can still describe "the very place in which the blessed Polycarp sat as he discoursed, and his goings out and his comings in, and the manner of his life, and his physical appearance," and the accounts Polycarp gave of his intercourse with John and the others who had seen the Lord. Polycrates of Ephesus, writing in the 190s, names him among the Quartodeciman authorities of Asia. Eusebius, compiling in the early fourth century, preserves the Irenaean fragments, the Polycrates letter, and much of the Smyrnaean account, and is the reason several of them survive at all.
Two things follow from that layering. First, "Polycarp knew John" is Irenaeus's claim about Polycarp, made decades later in letters written to win arguments, not a first-person statement by Polycarp; the claim is credible and load-bearing, and the layer should stay visible. Second, nothing whatever is attested about his family, birthplace, class, marriage, or upbringing. The one origin story, which makes him an eastern child bought as a slave at the gate of Ephesus by a Christian widow named Callisto and raised to be her heir, comes from a Life of Polycarp attributed to a "Pionius" and composed almost certainly in the late fourth century. Its modern editor, Lightfoot, judged it entirely fictional, and its most telling defect is that it does not know the two securest things about its subject, that he was John's disciple and that he kept the fourteenth day. Callisto and the Smyrnaean bishop Bucolus circulate widely in devotional writing; they come from there.
The date of the martyrdom is genuinely contested and should not be smoothed. Our own reckoning follows the majority modern position: W. H. Waddington in 1867 fixed the proconsulship of Statius Quadratus from inscriptions to 154 to 55, which places the death in February 155, and Lightfoot carried that dating into English scholarship. Eusebius put it about a decade later, around 166 to 167. Two qualifications belong with the majority view rather than being dropped from it: the February 23 date and the naming of Quadratus come from an addition made to the text after Eusebius, not from its earliest recoverable layer, and the reading of "the great Sabbath" as Purim, which is what allows a February date at all, is Lightfoot's argument. The text's own chapter 21, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers wording, gives the day as the seventh before the Kalends of May, which is April 25.
Polycarp is remembered on February 23 in the East and, since the reform of 1969, in the West; the ACNA 2019 calendar lists him as bishop of Smyrna and martyr. The Western observance is younger than the Eastern one. Before 1969 the Roman Martyrology kept him on January 26, and the feast is not an ancient one in the West at all: Peter Kwasniewski, writing from the post-conciliar working documents, notes that it is attested at Rome only in the mid-thirteenth century and is still missing from printed missals and breviaries in the 1520s, entering the books in the Tridentine reform of the later sixteenth century. He reads that as deliberate, the reformers wanting to show continuity between contemporary practice, relics and all, and the most ancient stratum of the Church.
Where his bones went after Smyrna gathered them is not known. Pilgrimage guides place relics under the main altar of Sant'Ambrogio della Massima in Rome, and a church bearing his name stands in Izmir, near but not verifiably on the site of the martyrdom; neither claim has documentation behind it.
He has no emblem of his own. Byzantine and modern Orthodox icons show him simply as an aged bishop, white-bearded, vested, holding a closed Gospel book. His one memorable image in the West is Jan Luyken's 1685 engraving of the burning, made for the Anabaptist Martyrs Mirror, where Polycarp's death opens the whole martyr-genealogy: a persecuted people claiming the church of the martyrs as their own.
Quotations from Polycarp's letter and from the account of his death follow the 1885 Ante-Nicene Fathers translation of Roberts and Donaldson, in the public domain: The Martyrdom of Polycarp, chapters 7 ("The will of God be done"), 9 (the eighty-six years and the exchange with the proconsul), 10 ("I am a Christian" and the honour due to the powers ordained of God), 11 (the fire that burns for an hour), 14 (the prayer at the stake), 15 (the fire arching like a sail), and 18 (the bones more precious than jewels). The words of Irenaeus recalling Polycarp are from his Letter to Florinus, surviving only as quoted in Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History V.20, in A. C. McGiffert's translation for the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, volume I. The address "Bishop of the Church of the Smyrnaeans" is from Ignatius, Epistle to Polycarp, in the same Ante-Nicene Fathers volume. Irenaeus's account of the appointment at Smyrna and the visit to Rome is Against Heresies III.3.4; Eusebius's own placing of the martyrdom is at Ecclesiastical History III.36 and IV.14 to 15. Lightfoot's verdict on the Life of Polycarp accompanies his translation of that text. For the calendar history, Peter Kwasniewski, "The Feast of St Polycarp," New Liturgical Movement; for the Waddington dating, the 1911 Catholic Encyclopedia article "St. Polycarp"; for the modern dating challenge, Candida Moss, "On the Dating of Polycarp," Early Christianity 1.4 (2010), 539 to 574. The standard modern critical texts are J. B. Lightfoot, The Apostolic Fathers, Part II: S. Ignatius, S. Polycarp (2nd ed., 1889), and Michael W. Holmes, The Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations.
S. Polycarp was disciple of S. John the Evangelist, and S. John ordained him bishop of Smyrna. And there were at Rome then two heretics, that one was called Marcian and that other Valentine, the which had deceived much people by their false doctrine. Then S. Polycarp went to Rome on Easter-day, and there by his predication he brought again to the faith them that they had deceived. He wrote to the Philippians a much fair epistle, and much profitable, the which is yet read in Asia unto this day. It happened that in the time that Marcus Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius reigned, which was the year of grace one hundred and sixty-two, was made the fourth persecution on christian people, after the Emperor Nero, through all Asia.
S. Polycarp heard how the people cried and was moved, he therefore was never moved, but abode without dread. And he was gracious and courteous in manners and pleasant in regard, and tarried always in the city as an hardy champion of God. He was so much required of the people that he departed from the city with their familiar friends, that he went to the field nigh unto the city, and there he prayed all the night for the peace of all holy church. And thereof had he a custom all the days of his life. It happed that three days before that he was taken, as he prayed in a night he had a vision, that seemed that his hair was burnt, and when he awoke he told to them that were with him the vision, and expounded it to them, saying that: For certain he should be burnt for love of God. When he saw that they approached him that would have taken him, he went to meet them and right gladly received them, whereof they were much abashed that they were commanded to take so good a man. And anon he laid the table to his enemies, and made to them as good cheer as they had been his friends, and gave to them largely wine and meat, and get of them leave to pray an hour, and all that hour he prayed much devoutly for all the state of holy church. When the hour was passed he mounted upon an ass, and was brought into the city, and as they led him, Herod came, which wwas provost of the country, and his father with him, and they took him into a chariot with them, and
said to him much sweetly: Wherefore do you not sacrifice as the others do? What harm is it to call Cæsar his lord, and to do sacrifice to the gods for to live surely? And when they saw that it availed not, and that always he was firm and constant in the law of God, they were much wroth with him and did to him much harm in the chariot, and as he approached the city a great multitude of people began to murmur against him. Anon a voice descended from heaven saying unto him: Polycarp be strong and constant. That voice was heard of many but none saw it. Then anon it was told to the provost all openly, that Polycarp had three times confessed to be christian. When these tidings were heard all the people of the city of Smyrna, paynims and Jews, began to cry in great ire: This is the master and doctor of all the christian people that be in Asia, and has destroyed all our gods, we require that he be burnt all quick. Then the people assembled much wood and brought him to a stake. And when they brought him to the stake they would have bound him thereto, and nailed the bonds with great nails. Then he said to them: Let me alone, for he that has ordained me to suffer this torment of fire shall give to me virtue of patience, without moving me from this place, for to endure and suffer the flame of the fire.
Then the tyrants left the nails, and bound him with cords to the stake, and his hands bound behind him. And as in his passion he praised and blessed our Lord, and the fire was burning and a great flame shining, a much notable miracle was showed right there to much people, which God showed to the end that it should be showed unto all other. And the miracle was this, that the flame departed all about him in manner of a chamber by virtue of a sweet wind that came from heaven, and the body of the martyr was not as flesh burnt in the flame, but as fair as it had been purified in a furnace, and they that were about him felt an odour so sweet as it had been incense or precious ointment. When the tyrants saw that the fire might not consume the body of the glorious martyr, they made the ministers to approach and did them to smite him through the body with a spear, and then issued out of his glorious body so great abundance of blood that it quenched the fire. And when the people saw the miracle they departed, having much marvel that they did so much cruelty to the friends of God. And with this glorious martyr were twelve other martyrs martyred, for to get the joy of heaven. The which grant us the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
A further strand of modern scholarship, dating from the later twentieth century, doubts the document's unity rather than its calendar: the miraculous elements, the deliberate shaping of the arrest and trial on the Passion narratives, and above all the editorial rebuke of the volunteer Quintus in chapter 4, which von Campenhausen and Candida Moss read as a later insertion against Montanism. Moss goes furthest, treating the whole letter as a much later literary construction. These are modern departures, and they are worth naming plainly; they have not displaced the reading of the letter as substantially what it claims to be, a Smyrnaean church's account written for another church.
Its text has been carried carefully. Every surviving Greek manuscript of the letter to the Philippians breaks off mid-sentence in chapter 9 and runs straight on into the Epistle of Barnabas without a scribal break, an inherited fault from a damaged exemplar; chapters 10 to 14 survive only in Latin. The best Greek witness is an eleventh-century Vatican codex. For the Martyrdom, the Greek witnesses are all tenth century and later, and Eusebius's abridgement is by far the earliest, though it stops before the closing chapters that carry the account's own account of how it was copied.
British (Received Pronunciation): Polycarp /ˈpɒlɪkɑːrp/; Marcion /ˈmɑːʃiən/; Smyrnaean /smɜːrˈniːən/
Almighty God, you gave your servant Polycarp of Smyrna boldness to confess the Name of our Savior Jesus Christ before the rulers of this world, and courage to die for this faith: Grant that we may always be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in us, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Martyr
Jeremiah 15:15–21Psalm 34Revelation 7:9–17Luke 12:4–12