Anastasius of Persia

Anastasius of Persia, known before his conversion by the Persian name Magundat (also rendered Magundates), was a Magian—that is, a member of the Zoroastrian priestly class—and a soldier in the army of the Sasanian king Khosrau II in the early seventh century. The principal source for his life is an early Greek Passion, composed not long after his death and later translated into Latin and other languages. According to that tradition, his change of faith was bound up with the capture of Jerusalem by Sasanian forces in 614 and the removal of the relic of the True Cross into Persian territory. Magundat encountered the Cross and Christian captives, inquired into the Christian religion, and was so affected that he left military service in order to seek baptism.

He made his way into the former Byzantine provinces of the Near East and was baptized at Jerusalem, receiving the name Anastasius, which evokes the Resurrection. Sources associate the baptism with Modestus, who was then administering the Church of Jerusalem while Patriarch Zacharias remained a captive in Persia. Anastasius entered monastic life at a monastery in the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, identified in the tradition as the monastery of Abbot Anastasius and connected with the Judean desert communities. There he spent some seven years, learning Greek, studying the Scriptures, and following the ascetic discipline of Palestinian monasticism. Nothing reliable is recorded of a wife or children; after his conversion he lived as a monk.

Wishing to confess the faith more openly, he left the monastery and went to Caesarea Maritima in Palestine, then under Persian administration. There he confronted Magian worship, denounced Zoroastrian rites, and was arrested by the Persian authorities. After local imprisonment and interrogation he was sent into the interior of the Sasanian Empire. Repeated efforts were made to force him to recant—torture, confinement, and the pressure of his former co-religionists—but he refused. He was put to death on 22 January 628 at Bethsaloe (also rendered Barsaloe), a locality in the Persian realm often placed in relation to the Euphrates. Accounts of the Passion state that he was strangled and that his body was subsequently beheaded, and that other Christians suffered with him. His death fell in the last months of Khosrau II’s reign, shortly before that king’s overthrow and the end of the war with Heraclius.

Christians recovered his remains, which were first taken to Palestine and became objects of veneration. Relics were later translated westward. In Rome his memory was joined to the monastery ad Aquas Salvias (Tre Fontane) and to the church of Saints Vincent and Anastasius (Santi Vincenzo e Anastasio alle Tre Fontane), where relics associated with him have been kept. His feast on 22 January entered the Roman Martyrology and the Byzantine liturgical calendar; some Eastern commemorations also mark a translation of relics on a neighbouring date. He is remembered as a convert from Zoroastrianism, a monk of the Judean tradition, and a martyr of the final phase of Sasanian pressure on Christians in the Near East. No ancient source preserves a verified year of birth, and later notices that assign him a precise native town are not uniform enough to be treated as certain.