Procopius

Saint Procopius of Scythopolis, commemorated in later calendars as Procopius of Caesarea or Procopius the Great Martyr, is the earliest named Christian put to death in Palestine during the Diocletianic persecution. The only near-contemporary account is that of Eusebius of Caesarea in On the Martyrs of Palestine. Eusebius, who lived in the same province and wrote within living memory of the events, states that Procopius was a native of Jerusalem who had settled at Scythopolis (Beth Shean). There he served the church in three offices: as a reader of Scripture, as an interpreter who rendered the Greek biblical text into Aramaic for the local congregation, and as an exorcist. Eusebius stresses his austere manner of life, his devotion to prayer and fasting, and his withdrawal from public affairs. He belonged to the minor clergy; there is no reliable evidence that he was a bishop, a member of any later monastic order, or a holder of civil or military command.

When the first edict of the Great Persecution reached Palestine in 303, Procopius was the first Christian of the province to be arrested. He was taken from Scythopolis to Caesarea Maritima, the seat of the governor, and ordered to sacrifice to the gods. He replied that there is one God, the maker of all things. Pressed to sacrifice to the four emperors of the Tetrarchy, he answered with a line of Homer to the effect that many lords are not a good thing and that there should be one lord, one king. He was beheaded at once. Eusebius dates the execution to the seventh of the Macedonian month Daisios, that is 7 June 303, in the first year of the persecution. Because the sentence was carried out immediately, the historical Procopius did not undergo the long sequence of tortures that later passiones describe. His martyrdom consisted in a brief confession and a prompt death. No contemporary source records the place of his burial, the name of any spouse or child, or any other biographical detail beyond what Eusebius preserves.

From late antiquity a much fuller legendary passion circulated in Greek, in which the Jerusalem-born cleric is recast as a Roman military commander named Neanias, son of a Christian mother Theodosia and a pagan father, dispatched by Diocletian against the Christians of Alexandria, converted by a vision of a crystalline cross and of Christ, renamed Procopius, and subjected at Caesarea to prolonged tortures before being beheaded with a group of companions. That military-martyr narrative, which resembles the cycle of Saint George and is not historically trustworthy, became the dominant liturgical portrait of the saint in the Byzantine East, where he is numbered among the Great Martyrs. The Roman Martyrology and the Byzantine calendar both keep his feast on 8 July at Caesarea in Palestine, a liturgical date that does not coincide with Eusebius’s 7 June and reflects the later legendary tradition rather than the historian’s chronology.

The cult spread widely in the Christian East. Churches were dedicated to him in Constantinople and in other Byzantine cities, and he appears in art as a youthful warrior-saint, an iconography derived from the legendary passio rather than from Eusebius. In the Latin West he was known chiefly through the martyrologies and never attained the same prominence. He was not Bishop of Rome, nor patriarch or catholicos of any see. Formal papal canonization did not exist in the fourth century; his sanctity rests on immediate local veneration and on Eusebius’s testimony, later received throughout the church. Apart from the Jerusalem origin, the three church offices at Scythopolis, the appearance before the governor at Caesarea, and the beheading in 303, the details of his life remain unknown.