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Biography

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Procopius of Scythopolis, known in the Eastern churches as the Great Martyr Procopius, is the first Palestinian Christian whose death in the Diocletianic persecution is recorded by a contemporary. The principal historical source is Eusebius of Caesarea's Martyrs of Palestine, written in the early fourth century. Eusebius states that Procopius was a native of Aelia (Jerusalem) who lived at Scythopolis (Beth Shean), where he served the church in three offices: as a reader (lector), as an interpreter who rendered Greek into Aramaic for the local congregation, and as an exorcist. No ancient source preserves a year of birth, and none can be inferred without conjecture.

Eusebius portrays him as an ascetic from childhood, trained in what that author calls philosophy. He is said to have so subjected body to mind and mind to God that he took no food before sunset and, on one day each week, only bread and water, and to have occupied himself solely with the divine scriptures. The resulting picture is that of a clerical ascetic attached to a provincial Palestinian church, not of a soldier or imperial official.

In the first year of the Great Persecution, 303, Procopius was sent to Caesarea Maritima and arraigned before the governor Flavianus (later Latin tradition sometimes reads Fabianus). Ordered to sacrifice to the gods, he refused. When commanded to sacrifice for the four reigning emperors, he answered with a Homeric verse 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, corresponding to 7 June 303, and presents Procopius as the proto-martyr of Palestine.

A later Greek Passio, probably of the fifth or sixth century, recast this lector as a military saint named Neanias, son of a Christian mother Theodosia, appointed duke of Alexandria by Diocletian, converted by a vision of the Cross, baptized under the name Procopius, and subjected to a long sequence of tortures before death at Caesarea. Byzantine liturgy and iconography follow that legendary recension, ranking him among the Great Martyrs and depicting him in armour. The Roman Martyrology and the Byzantine calendar commemorate him on 8 July, a date that belongs to the later tradition rather than to Eusebius's June chronology. No contemporary text records his place of burial, and his cult is of the early, pre-congregational type, without a medieval act of papal canonization.

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