Thraseas

Thraseas was a Christian bishop of the second century who served the church of Eumenia, also known as Eumeneia, a city located in Phrygia in western Asia Minor. Almost nothing is known of his early life, family, or the circumstances of his election to the episcopate. He is remembered principally as a martyr and as one of the Asian church leaders invoked by Polycrates of Ephesus in defense of the Quartodeciman dating of Easter.

The sole substantial ancient testimony concerning Thraseas appears in a letter written by Polycrates, bishop of Ephesus, to Pope Victor I of Rome around the years 190 to 195. The letter, quoted at length by Eusebius of Caesarea in the fifth book of his Ecclesiastical History, was composed during a controversy over the proper date for celebrating the Paschal feast. Polycrates asserted that the churches of Asia had received from the apostles themselves the custom of observing Easter on the fourteenth day of the Jewish month of Nisan, regardless of the day of the week. To support this claim he listed a succession of distinguished figures who had kept the same practice, among them the apostle Philip and his daughters, Polycarp of Smyrna, and Thraseas, both bishop and martyr from Eumenia, who sleeps in Smyrna.

The phrase indicating that he sleeps in Smyrna shows that Thraseas had already died by the time Polycrates wrote and that his remains were interred in Smyrna rather than in his own see of Eumenia. Later liturgical tradition, recorded in the Roman Martyrology, commemorates him on 5 October as a bishop of Eumenia who suffered martyrdom at Smyrna. No contemporary account of the trial, the charges brought against him, or the manner of his death has survived. His martyrdom therefore belongs to the poorly documented persecutions that occurred in Asia Minor during the second century. No precise date for his death can be established from the surviving sources.

Beyond these few facts, the historical record is silent. Thraseas is not mentioned in the writings of Irenaeus, Melito, or other second-century authors whose works have been preserved, nor do any letters or treatises attributed to him exist. His inclusion in Polycrates' list nevertheless places him among the respected great lights of the Asian churches and attests to the continuity of a local episcopal tradition that claimed apostolic origins. In the later martyrological tradition he is honored as a saint, though he never became the object of a widespread cult or the patron of particular places or causes.