Pionius of Smyrna

Life and Ministry

Pionius was a presbyter of the church at Smyrna, the same church whose bishop Polycarp had been martyred almost a century earlier. The Martyrdom of Pionius, an authentic court-record-style Passio composed shortly after his death and preserved in Greek, presents him as a learned man, deeply versed in the Hebrew scriptures, who in early AD 250 — at the very start of the Decian persecution — gathered his household and two companions, the woman Sabina and the man Asclepiades, for prayer and the Eucharist on the anniversary of Polycarp's martyrdom, knowing that arrest was coming. He bound rope nooses around his own neck and the necks of his companions, in token that they would not flee, and waited for the police.

Circumstances of Death

Arrested and brought before the temple of Nemesis, Pionius preached at length to the assembled Jews and pagans, refusing to sacrifice and refuting both the Greek mythology and the Jewish accusation that Christ was a magician. He was beaten, paraded through the marketplace with his head pressed down, and after months of imprisonment was condemned by the proconsul Quintillianus to be burned alive. He was nailed to a wooden post — the executioners attempted to compel him to apostasy by the iron — and the fire was lit beneath him on 12 March AD 250. As the flames rose he was heard to pray, and the Passio records that his body was untouched by the fire except in the head, his face untouched even by smoke, so that the witnesses said he looked like one falling asleep.

Legacy

Pionius's Passio is one of the historically richest of the third-century martyr-acts, often paired with the Martyrdom of Polycarp as a Smyrnaean dyptich and used by Eusebius. He stands as a witness against two errors at once: the pagan civic religion of sacrifice and the synagogue's claim that the Christ of the Christians was a sorcerer. His prepared rope around his neck before the police arrived is one of the most striking images in the early literature — the deliberate refusal to flee, the body presented for binding before the chains came. He chose his own bonds, that he might not be chosen by lesser ones.