Saint Pothinus

Saint Pothinus (Greek Pothinos) was the first historically attested bishop of Lugdunum, the Roman city that is now Lyon in France, and one of the principal figures among the Christians put to death there in the late second century. His name is Greek, and the congregation he led included many believers of Asian origin, among them the future bishop and theologian Irenaeus. Later tradition sometimes linked Pothinus with the churches of Asia Minor and with Polycarp of Smyrna, but no contemporary source records his birthplace, parentage, or the year of his arrival in Gaul. By the 170s he was an aged bishop of a bilingual community that kept close correspondence with the churches of Asia and Phrygia.

The chief source for his life and death is the Letter of the Churches of Vienne and Lyons, a contemporary narrative sent to the churches of Asia and Phrygia and preserved in large part by Eusebius of Caesarea in Book 5 of the Ecclesiastical History. Eusebius dates the outbreak to the seventeenth year of Marcus Aurelius, conventionally 177. Under local hostility, Christians in Lyon and nearby Vienne were barred from public places, arrested, tortured, and condemned. The letter identifies Pothinus as the one entrusted with the episcopal ministry of Lyon and states that he was more than ninety years of age and very weak in body, though his spirit remained firm.

Brought before the magistrate, Pothinus was asked who the God of the Christians was. He answered that if his interrogators were worthy they would know. He was then beaten without regard for his age, dragged about, and struck, after which he was cast into prison. Two days later he died there of his injuries, becoming one of the first of the Lyon martyrs to perish. Other members of the church, including the slave Blandina, the deacon Sanctus of Vienne, Maturus, Attalus of Pergamum, and the youth Ponticus, were later killed in the amphitheater. The letter reports that the bodies of the martyrs were exposed, then burned, and that the ashes were thrown into the Rhône so that the Christians would have no relics to honor.

Pothinus was succeeded in the see of Lyon by Irenaeus, previously a presbyter of the same church. Memory of Pothinus and his companions persisted in Gaul; Gregory of Tours in the sixth century still recounted the Lyon martyrdoms. In the Roman Martyrology and in Latin liturgical calendars he is commemorated with the other martyrs of Lyon on 2 June. He is venerated as a saint and martyr of the early Church; there was no later papal process of canonization in the medieval or modern sense. Almost nothing else about his personal life can be verified: no spouse, children, or membership in a later-style religious order is recorded, and a precise year or place of birth is not documented.