Symeon Bar Sabbae

Life and Ministry

Symeon bar Sabbae was bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the twin capital of the Sasanian empire on the Tigris, in the second quarter of the fourth century. His see governed the Christians of Persia — a substantial minority drawn from Aramaic-speaking trade towns, Jewish-Christian villages along the lower Tigris, and Christian deportees from Roman Mesopotamia carried east in the Persian wars of the previous century. After Constantine's edicts had made the Roman state Christian, the Sasanian crown began to suspect that the church in its own territory had become a fifth column for its enemy. Shapur II (reigned 309–379), needing revenue for the long war with Rome and pretexts against suspect populations, doubled the head-tax on Christians and ordered Symeon to collect it from his own people.

Circumstances of Death

Symeon refused. He held that a bishop is appointed to teach and to baptize, not to serve as a tax-farmer against his flock, and that the order itself was a step toward forcing apostasy. The king's officers arrested him at Karka d-Ledan and brought him in chains to the court at Bēth Lapaṭ (Gundeshapur) in the spring of either AD 341 or 344. He was made to stand outside the king's tent at the spring New Year and ordered to perform the customary obeisance to the sun. When he refused, Shapur is reported to have offered him his life in exchange for a single act of fire-worship. Symeon answered that he had been ordained to worship the maker of the sun, not the sun. He was beheaded on Good Friday morning, after watching the executioner kill more than a hundred Christian priests, deacons, and laypeople — including his closest companion, the eunuch Gushtazad of the royal household — under the same order.

Legacy

The Martyrdom of Symeon, written in Syriac within a generation of his death, is the founding text of the Persian Martyr Acts — a body of literature that documents what tradition came to call the Great Persecution of Shapur II (c. AD 339–379), in which the Syriac sources count more than sixteen thousand named victims over forty years. Symeon's refusal to collect a hostile tax from his flock established a long bishopric tradition in the Eastern church of resisting state instruments aimed through the church at the church. The Church of the East — the Syriac-tradition church that carried the gospel to Central Asia, India, and China across the next thousand years — traced its line of patriarchs from this see. Symeon stands at the head of that line, killed for refusing to be a useful clergyman to a hostile crown.