There are many, well-documented accounts of the persecution within the Roman Empire. Less is known about those in Persia. Listen to hear a little bit about what life was life for ancient Persians under Shah Shapur II.
Aphrahat the Persian Sage Writings
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00:00 --> 00:03 [SPEAKER_00]: Martyr's Emissionaries is a production of Revive Studios.
00:07 --> 00:13 [SPEAKER_00]: You're listening to Martyr's Emissionaries, I'm Elise and in every episode I'll bring you a new Martyr and or missionary, the cold and the brave.
00:13 --> 00:19 [SPEAKER_00]: In this episode we're talking about the persecution of Persian Christians under Sassanid King Shippur II.
00:40 --> 00:53 [SPEAKER_00]: One of the regions we've never covered in this show, at least to my knowledge, where Remembrance has been a Persia, and that would have continued for who knows how long had we not been in a random bookshop in Perth, Australia earlier this month?
00:53 --> 01:00 [SPEAKER_00]: And I want to make an aside here to say that one of the other perks of going to Perth was actually meeting Elisina, as she and her family were absolutely lovely.
01:00 --> 01:01 [SPEAKER_00]: We got to spend
01:01 --> 01:08 [SPEAKER_00]: afternoon with them and it was a lot of fun and I just really appreciated them and I've also appreciated the other listeners.
01:08 --> 01:10 [SPEAKER_00]: We've gotten to meet a few of you guys.
01:10 --> 01:17 [SPEAKER_00]: We've all been so absolutely lovely so I just wanted to give a little shout out there of how enjoyable that experience was.
01:17 --> 01:21 [SPEAKER_00]: But back to the bookshop, my husband was perusing the religious section.
01:21 --> 01:25 [SPEAKER_00]: Usually they're not super good, but this one actually had a pretty good selection of things.
01:25 --> 01:29 [SPEAKER_00]: And he found a book that had a blurb on fourth century Persian persecutions.
01:30 --> 01:34 [SPEAKER_00]: And we were looking to see if there's a bit more information on it when we got home.
01:34 --> 01:38 [SPEAKER_00]: And turns out there is actually a fair amount of information about it.
01:38 --> 01:40 [SPEAKER_00]: So that is how this episode came to be.
01:41 --> 01:43 [SPEAKER_00]: And so let's just go ahead and talk about it.
01:43 --> 01:46 [SPEAKER_00]: And I know that I may be stabbing the absolute obvious here.
01:46 --> 01:48 [SPEAKER_00]: You're going to be like Elise, of course, everybody knows this.
01:49 --> 01:51 [SPEAKER_00]: But Persia was a really big deal.
01:51 --> 01:54 [SPEAKER_00]: They were a massive empire in the ancient world.
01:54 --> 01:59 [SPEAKER_00]: They were the foremost rival of the Roman Empire for seven hundred years.
01:59 --> 02:01 [SPEAKER_00]: And these two empires hate at each other.
02:01 --> 02:09 [SPEAKER_00]: At one point underdarius the first Persia was at its peak and may have been if not bigger than equal in size to Rome at its peak.
02:10 --> 02:17 [SPEAKER_00]: For the time period, we're going to be talking about Persia is about two-thirds the size of Rome and covers a lot of countries.
02:17 --> 02:23 [SPEAKER_00]: The primary two countries were Iran and Iraq, where all of the government and administration headquarters were.
02:23 --> 02:34 [SPEAKER_00]: but there were several of these stone countries and parts of the Caucasus, parts of Turkey, Syria, parts of the Arabian Peninsula, and all of these were part at one point or other of the Persian Empire.
02:36 --> 02:42 [SPEAKER_00]: The Parthians, who were the ruling empire before the Saxony take took over, they're generally peaceful.
02:43 --> 02:47 [SPEAKER_00]: They, at least in one of their own borders, they didn't really persecute anybody.
02:47 --> 02:51 [SPEAKER_00]: They tended to take the opposite opinion of the Romans just because they hated them.
02:52 --> 02:57 [SPEAKER_00]: And so because the Romans were suspicious of the Christians, the Persians let them in and we're like, it's no big deal.
02:57 --> 02:59 [SPEAKER_00]: Just come on into our borders.
03:00 --> 03:10 [SPEAKER_00]: And the other reason is that Zoroastrianism, which was the major religion of purchase during the time, was actually much closer to Christianity than Roman's Pantheon of God's.
03:11 --> 03:21 [SPEAKER_00]: Zoroastrianism, I can hear you asking it, it's a 3000-year-old religion that originated in Persia by a supposed prophet named Zorooster, or Zoroastra, maybe.
03:22 --> 03:34 [SPEAKER_00]: And he taught that there was one Supreme God, and an ongoing battle of darkness against the light, and humans have the free will to choose which to serve, and to serve the light they can do that by their good thoughts, their good words, their good deeds.
03:35 --> 03:38 [SPEAKER_00]: and all of this goodness will help the light prevail.
03:38 --> 03:44 [SPEAKER_00]: Now, as a fun fact, there are 200 Zoroastrians living in the world today.
03:44 --> 03:50 [SPEAKER_00]: Most of them are in India and Iran as one would expect, but there's actually a growing number in North America as well.
03:51 --> 04:01 [SPEAKER_00]: Now back to the history side of things, in the early 200s, Rome started to get a bit more up, but he towards the Persians, and made six several successful incursions into their territory.
04:01 --> 04:08 [SPEAKER_00]: And Persia kind of grew tired of their very apathetic partheon empire and demanded a more authoritarian rule.
04:09 --> 04:15 [SPEAKER_00]: And this is how you get the Sassanids, who had promised to keep the Romans out and expand the empire.
04:15 --> 04:21 [SPEAKER_00]: And the Sassanids were also much more firmly
04:22 --> 04:29 [SPEAKER_00]: Now, the very first case of religious persecution for Christians wasn't actually about them at all.
04:29 --> 04:31 [SPEAKER_00]: It was a case of mistaken identity.
04:31 --> 04:34 [SPEAKER_00]: There was a guy who was calling himself the prophet Monny.
04:35 --> 04:40 [SPEAKER_00]: And he had combined Zoroastrian and Christian and Nostick beliefs into some weird cult.
04:40 --> 04:43 [SPEAKER_00]: You're probably familiar with, on some level, called the Manachians.
04:44 --> 04:46 [SPEAKER_00]: And they heard us really weird.
04:47 --> 04:48 [SPEAKER_00]: Like, look into it, it's just odd.
04:48 --> 04:52 [SPEAKER_00]: I thought about kind of doing a blurb on it, and then I was like, nah, it's just odd.
04:52 --> 04:55 [SPEAKER_00]: But they cloaked themselves in a lot of Christian language.
04:56 --> 04:59 [SPEAKER_00]: And this guy, Monning, is actually even calling himself a disciple of Christ.
05:00 --> 05:03 [SPEAKER_00]: And he ended up being executed by the sass and his empire.
05:03 --> 05:07 [SPEAKER_00]: He was crucified, actually, which I didn't realize was something the Persians also did.
05:08 --> 05:13 [SPEAKER_00]: But it continued on even beyond them, obviously, it outlived the original prophet.
05:14 --> 05:21 [SPEAKER_00]: And this ended up being about a 20-year persecution that lasted until the mid to late 200s.
05:21 --> 05:31 [SPEAKER_00]: And this leads us into Shaw Shippur II, who was born in 309, so things have kind of calmed down by now, but he's born into a crumbling empire.
05:31 --> 05:36 [SPEAKER_00]: So less than 100 years of sassanid rule, and it looks like they're in the twilight years.
05:36 --> 05:46 [SPEAKER_00]: the Romans had taken a lot of land from the Persians, and they were also being beset by these wandering hordes of Arab and other near-duels who were just kind of taken and choosing third land.
05:47 --> 05:55 [SPEAKER_00]: But, Shasha for the second was not about to give up his empire that easily, and so he rallied as people and prepared them to fight back.
05:55 --> 06:03 [SPEAKER_00]: And in the midst of this rallying, he receives a letter from Constantine, who had recently converted to Christianity.
06:03 --> 06:07 [SPEAKER_00]: And he writes him to ask him to treat the Christians and his empire well.
06:08 --> 06:15 [SPEAKER_00]: He said, Now because your power is great, I commend these persons to your protection because your Piety is imminent.
06:15 --> 06:25 [SPEAKER_00]: I commit them to your care, cherish them with your wanted humanity and kindness, for by this proof of faith you will secure an immeasurable benefit both to yourself and us.
06:26 --> 06:43 [SPEAKER_00]: This letter backfired for the Christians because previously, Shippur had been relatively unaware of them, relatively unbothered, but knowing that his sworn enemy was now a Christian and then was telling him how to treat people like himself within his own empire was not what Shippur wanted to hear.
06:43 --> 06:47 [SPEAKER_00]: But this information doesn't immediately attract attention to the Christians in a negative way.
06:48 --> 06:57 [SPEAKER_00]: It kind of sits at the back of his brain, and it doesn't come to mind again until Constantine had geared up for another raid against Persia, but then he ends up dying in 337.
06:58 --> 07:15 [SPEAKER_00]: So, Shapur is using this as a perfect opportunity to go and take back some of this land, and he decides to take back specifically a city that Rome had taken from them about 40 years before, and he failed, and so he blames the Christians for his failure claiming that they ate Rome.
07:15 --> 07:17 [SPEAKER_00]: which is a tale as old as time.
07:17 --> 07:32 [SPEAKER_00]: You can even find evidence of it within Varpasha, who was the leader of the young Turks during the Armenian genocide, when he fails to take a city in Russia because he decides to invade in the middle of winter.
07:32 --> 07:40 [SPEAKER_00]: And all of a sudden, he blames the Armenians for helping the Russians and then uses that to, of course, commit genocide.
07:41 --> 07:46 [SPEAKER_00]: And if you're interested in that episode, I'll link it in the in the episode description.
07:47 --> 08:00 [SPEAKER_00]: But back to the Persians, in a city near current day Baghdad, rumors started by the religious officials of Zoroastrianism, claimed that the bishop there whose name was Simon was providing military intelligence to the Romans.
08:00 --> 08:09 [SPEAKER_00]: And this was intended to stoke the flames against the Christians, and in 339, so a couple years later, this begins the official crackdown on Christians.
08:09 --> 08:14 [SPEAKER_00]: So Shippur ends up doubling taxes on Christians and tells Simon to collect these taxes.
08:15 --> 08:25 [SPEAKER_00]: He refuses, as the Shaw knew that he would, and so he throws Simon into prison and then forced him to watch about a hundred of the clergy die before he himself was beheaded.
08:25 --> 08:36 [SPEAKER_00]: Another account of martyrdom comes from a translation of the act of Santorum, or the acts of the Saints, which is a compilation of 68 volumes documents from the ancient to Middle Ages.
08:37 --> 08:43 [SPEAKER_00]: This particular event takes place in 342, and the 30-second year of Shaw support the second.
08:43 --> 08:50 [SPEAKER_00]: He issued an edict that Christians will be rounded up and either slaughtered or forced into slavery without the right to a trial.
08:50 --> 08:58 [SPEAKER_00]: And many of the prefectures eagerly kind of pre-gathered their Christians and through them into prison awaiting the official edict that was going to be sent to them.
08:59 --> 09:08 [SPEAKER_00]: And when the Edict arrived in each district, Christians were stabbed or had their throat slashed, and this slaughter went on from good Friday until the Sunday after Easter.
09:08 --> 09:12 [SPEAKER_00]: And during these slaughters, a favorite unique of the Shah was murdered.
09:12 --> 09:18 [SPEAKER_00]: He was immediately immediately amended the Edict to only target church officials like Bishop's monks' priests and nuns.
09:19 --> 09:27 [SPEAKER_00]: And the estimated total of deaths really is quite varying.
09:28 --> 09:32 [SPEAKER_00]: but either way, quite the large amount of deaths.
09:32 --> 09:45 [SPEAKER_00]: And there's an added layer to this because the queen falls ill and the Jews who had it out for the Christians tell the queen that her illness is the cause of a curse put on her by those sisters of the order of Simon.
09:45 --> 09:47 [SPEAKER_00]: who had been beheaded a couple of years before.
09:47 --> 09:48 [SPEAKER_00]: There were two women.
09:48 --> 09:49 [SPEAKER_00]: One was a widow.
09:49 --> 10:02 [SPEAKER_00]: Her name is for buta and then she had an unmarried sister, Tharba, along with Tharba's serving girl who was also unmarried and they swear their innocence, they're like, why would we want revenge because our brother is with the Lord?
10:02 --> 10:03 [SPEAKER_00]: and they get thrown into prison.
10:04 --> 10:06 [SPEAKER_00]: Now, Farba, unlike her name, is beautiful.
10:07 --> 10:12 [SPEAKER_00]: And one of the judges wants to marry her and secure her freedom, and she says she's married to Christ, and she refuses.
10:12 --> 10:21 [SPEAKER_00]: He tries again, it doesn't work, and then he tells them, hey, you can live as long as you sacrifice to the sun, but they're like, we're not going to do that.
10:22 --> 10:29 [SPEAKER_00]: And so the court magicians who were put in charge of their execution, they devised a method of execution, they claimed could cure the queen.
10:30 --> 10:37 [SPEAKER_00]: They would, these girls will be sent into their bodies placed on either side of the road, and the queen will walk between these halves.
10:37 --> 10:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Now I'm going to actually read from the source itself.
10:41 --> 10:48 [SPEAKER_00]: Even after this sentence, Tharbas and Myra found means to let her know that it was still on her power to prevent her death by consenting to marry him.
10:49 --> 10:55 [SPEAKER_00]: But she cried out with indignation, most impenetive men, how could you again entertain such a dishonest thought?
10:55 --> 11:01 [SPEAKER_00]: For me, courageously to die is to live, but life purchased by baseless is worse than any death.
11:01 --> 11:04 [SPEAKER_00]: But when they were come to the place of execution.
11:04 --> 11:15 [SPEAKER_00]: Each person was tied to two stakes, and with a saw sawn into each half thus separated, was cut into six parts, and being thrown into so many baskets were hung on two forked stakes.
11:16 --> 11:23 [SPEAKER_00]: Placed enough in the figure of half-crosses, leaving an open path between them, through which the queen superstitiously passed the same day.
11:23 --> 11:32 [SPEAKER_00]: A witness adds that no sight could be more shocking or barbarous than this spectacle of the martyr's limbs truly mangled and exposed
11:33 --> 11:49 [SPEAKER_00]: there are other accounts of martyrdom we could read through, but one of the problems I was coming up with is that a lot of them come from an account that is actually from the 1700s and the purpose of that account was kind of a veneration of the saints, so they was trying to create a calendar of saints.
11:49 --> 11:51 [SPEAKER_00]: And so it was kind of unreliable.
11:51 --> 11:58 [SPEAKER_00]: They're interesting stories in there, but it's hard to tell you know what's real and what not, because they're kind of so far removed
11:58 --> 12:05 [SPEAKER_00]: The goal is a bit ambiguous, so I decided not to include those, but you can look them up.
12:05 --> 12:10 [SPEAKER_00]: They're very much available for free reading if you'd like to look a bit more.
12:10 --> 12:15 [SPEAKER_00]: But in the 360's, Persia was once again invaded by Constantine's nephew.
12:15 --> 12:19 [SPEAKER_00]: This is Julian the Apostate who judging by his name, it was not a Christian.
12:20 --> 12:28 [SPEAKER_00]: He actually identified himself as an Alexander the Great like figure, who wanted to restore Rome to its former pagan glory.
12:29 --> 12:33 [SPEAKER_00]: And this is apparently quite the common delusion for dictators.
12:34 --> 12:38 [SPEAKER_00]: But Julian was no Alexander, and he died very unherrulically.
12:38 --> 12:41 [SPEAKER_00]: being shot on the liver by a javelin, while retreating.
12:43 --> 12:50 [SPEAKER_00]: And Shippur takes this opportunity to demand that Rome give back all the territory they had taken from even before he was born.
12:51 --> 12:52 [SPEAKER_00]: And with this, he grows his empire.
12:52 --> 13:00 [SPEAKER_00]: He becomes, I think he's one of the greatest ends up being one of the greatest emperors for the Sassanid Empire.
13:00 --> 13:15 [SPEAKER_00]: and he decides to lay off the Christians, he's not interested in that anymore, and then a bit later on in the early 400s, a Persian Emperor signs an Edict of Toleration, and the Persians enjoy for the most part kind of an uneasy truce with the Zoroastrian's there.
13:16 --> 13:26 [SPEAKER_00]: And one of the sources I was reading for this episode, is a really good article by Desire and God, and the author mentions a man named Afra Hat.
13:27 --> 13:28 [SPEAKER_00]: He's Afra Hat, the Persian Sage.
13:29 --> 13:40 [SPEAKER_00]: And he wrote a series of homilies called The Demonstrations, and each demonstration covers a different subject, and one of them is on persecution, and seems to him and written for those Persians who were unable to escape Shippur.
13:41 --> 13:45 [SPEAKER_00]: And he covers all the times of persecutions
13:45 --> 13:48 [SPEAKER_00]: and even those in Rome under Diocletium.
13:48 --> 13:58 [SPEAKER_00]: He wrote, and also concerning our brethren who were in the West, in the days of Diocletian, there came great affliction and persecution to the whole Church of God, which is all in their regions.
13:59 --> 14:07 [SPEAKER_00]: The churches were overthrown and uprooted, and many confessors and martyrs made confession, and the Lord turned in mercy to them after they were persecuted.
14:07 --> 14:10 [SPEAKER_00]: Even as our Redeemer said, these things are to be.
14:10 --> 14:18 [SPEAKER_00]: The Apostle also said, also over us is set this cloud of confession, which is our honor
14:19 --> 14:22 [SPEAKER_00]: And honestly, the rest of this looks really interesting.
14:22 --> 14:24 [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to link it in the description here.
14:24 --> 14:28 [SPEAKER_00]: If you want to take a look at some more of these things that he has written.
14:28 --> 14:33 [SPEAKER_00]: In moving forward a little bit, Persia ends up being conquered by Arab Muslims in this seventh century.
14:34 --> 14:40 [SPEAKER_00]: And it had been previously kind of fragmented and weakened by several battles with the Byzantines.
14:40 --> 14:44 [SPEAKER_00]: And so they were not exactly prepared for an invasion.
14:44 --> 14:51 [SPEAKER_00]: Christians were allowed to practice their religion as long as they had certain limitations, like a lesser status and paid a special tax.
14:51 --> 14:55 [SPEAKER_00]: Persecution was mostly harassment and not necessarily violent.
14:56 --> 15:04 [SPEAKER_00]: At this end, it ended up changing, of course, in the 1979 under the Islamic Revolution, since the regime has come to power.
15:05 --> 15:12 [SPEAKER_00]: Traditional Christian minorities, like Armenians and
15:12 --> 15:17 [SPEAKER_00]: and if convicted under the apostasy laws, converts can be given the death penalty.
15:17 --> 15:26 [SPEAKER_00]: According to a report last year, religious freedom conditions in Iran remained poor, particularly for religious minorities, religious dissidents, and women and girls.
15:27 --> 15:33 [SPEAKER_00]: Authorities subjected prisoners to tamed on religious grounds to torture and severe punishment, including by denying the medical care.
15:33 --> 15:42 [SPEAKER_00]: The government also continued to systematically harass and intimidate and target religious minorities through its arbitrary arrests,
15:42 --> 15:53 [SPEAKER_00]: Forced closure of businesses, Iran's government carried out a total of 900 executions in 2024, and issued scores of death sentences for legislabased charges.
15:54 --> 16:08 [SPEAKER_00]: But despite this, according to the Kato Institute, they have a report that said, Iran now has one of the fastest growing Christian populations in the world, not in Grand Cathedral, not in public squares, but underground spreading quietly and carefully for the most part.
16:08 --> 16:10 [SPEAKER_00]: However, it is just ordinary Iranians.
16:11 --> 16:17 [SPEAKER_00]: Students, workers, even former Moulas, who have seen the darkness of the Islamic Republic and want something else.
16:18 --> 16:29 [SPEAKER_00]: And with the ongoing war and unrest in Iran I want to kind of encourage us all to pray for our brothers and sisters there and to pray for them to remain strong and for them to have the opportunity for religious freedom.
16:29 --> 16:36 [SPEAKER_00]: I hope you enjoy this episode learning about 4th century persecutions and touching a little bit on persecutions today.
16:36 --> 16:39 [SPEAKER_00]: And as always, thank you for listening to Mars and missionaries.
16:40 --> 16:41 [SPEAKER_00]: I'm Elise.