Saint Antipas of Pergamum

The second and third chapters of Revelation hold seven short letters, each addressed to "the angel" of a church in the Roman province of Asia, and each dictated by Christ to John. ¹² The third goes to Pergamum. In the Douay-Rheims it reads: "I know where thou dwellest, where the seat of Satan is: and thou holdest fast my name, and hast not denied my faith. Even in those days when Antipas was my faithful witness, who was slain among you, where Satan dwelleth." ¹

The New American Bible renders the same verse: "not even in the days of Antipas, my faithful witness, who was martyred among you, where Satan lives." ² The letter goes on to rebuke some at Pergamum who held "the teaching of Balaam" and others who followed the Nicolaitans, and closes with a promise to the victor of "hidden manna" and a white stone inscribed with a new name. ²

From the verse a reader can learn three things. Antipas belonged to the church at Pergamum, or at least died there. He was killed for the name of Christ, at a time when the rest of that church held firm. And by the time John wrote, his death was already in the past, something the church there would remember as "those days." ¹² Scripture gives no office, no age, no date and no manner of death. ¹²

The title Christ gives him is one Revelation uses for Christ himself. The book opens with greetings "from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn of the dead," and the letter to Laodicea is sent by "the faithful and true witness." ³⁴ Christ gives the same title to Antipas. ¹²

Tertullian, in his treatise Scorpiace, gathered the warnings and promises of these letters to urge Christians to stand firm and die for the Lord rather than deny him. He reminded his readers that the letter to Pergamum made mention "of Antipas, the very faithful martyr, who was slain where Satan dwells." ⁵ He is the earliest writer among the sources read for this page to name Antipas, and he adds nothing to what the verse says. ⁵

Pergamum was an old royal capital, bequeathed to Rome by its last king in 133 B.C. Siméon Vailhé, writing on the city for the Catholic Encyclopedia, notes its great altar adorned with a battle of the giants, its celebrated library, and the tradition that parchment was invented there. ⁷ The New American Bible's note calls it "a center for various kinds of pagan worship." ²

What "Satan's throne" means is not certain. The same note suggests it refers "to emperor worship and other pagan practices that flourished in Pergamum, perhaps specifically to the white marble altar erected and dedicated to Zeus by Eumenes II." ² Vailhé names the city's later martyrs as well, Carpus, Papylus and Agathonice, and begins his list with Antipas, on the strength of the Apocalypse. ⁷

Everything more that is told of Antipas comes from a Greek passion, which the Bollandist Daniel Papebroch printed in the Acta Sanctorum in a Latin translation by Francesco Zino, compared with a Greek manuscript in the Vatican. ⁶ Its story runs as follows. When Domitian ordered Christians everywhere to worship the gods, and John was exiled to Patmos, Antipas went on preaching in Pergamum without fear. ⁶ The demons, it says, appeared to the pagan priests in dreams and complained that they could no longer stay in the city, because Antipas, the leader of the Christians, was driving them out. ⁶

A crowd seized him and dragged him before the city's governor, who urged him to obey the emperor and spare himself. ⁶ Antipas answered that he was a Christian and would not obey. When the governor appealed to the age of the gods' worship, he replied that he was an old man, close to death, and would not throw away his confession of faith for a few more years. ⁶ He was taken to the temple of Diana, where a bronze statue of a bull had been heated over a fire, and shut inside it. There he prayed, thanking God for counting him among the martyrs and commending his spirit, and died, the Acts say, as if falling into a heavy sleep. ⁶

The 1897 English edition of the Roman Martyrology keeps the outline: "Under the emperor Domitian, he was shut up in a red-hot brazen ox, and thus consummated his martyrdom." ⁹ Catholic.net, in an entry translated from the Italian Santi e Beati, tells the same story of the arrest, the governor and the bronze bull, but dates it to the reign of Nero. ¹¹

Papebroch did not take the Acts for an eyewitness record. He judged them a panegyric composed long afterward, in a time of peace for the Church, by a member of the clergy of Pergamum, since the author speaks of the relics being laid "in this place" where his own congregation gathered. ⁶ He noted that the text contains nothing about the saint's life, only his death as remembered by later generations, and that the long exchange with the governor was the author's own composition, written to show the martyr's constancy in rhetorical form. ⁶

The account is old all the same. Papebroch quotes Andrew, archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia, who in his commentary on the Apocalypse said that he had once read the martyrdom of Antipas, and Andrew's successor Arethas, who wrote that the record of his witness survived to his own day. ⁶ Catholic.net places Andrew's commentary in the seventh century. ¹¹

The Acts also carry the tradition that Antipas was bishop of Pergamum. Papebroch calls it the received tradition among the Greeks, and the Greek liturgy says it plainly: in the canon for his feast by Joseph the Hymnographer, Pergamum rejoices on this day in its most holy shepherd, and Antipas is said to have drawn his gifts of the Spirit from the teaching of John, who leaned on the Lord's breast. ⁶ Neither Scripture nor either Martyrology calls him a bishop. ¹⁹¹⁰ Catholic.net adds that he is shown in icons as a bishop, and that Eastern tradition counts him among the seventy-two disciples. ¹¹

The Acts end with devout men gathering his remains and laying them at Pergamum, in a place that was still known, the writer says, for miracles and cures. ⁶ A synaxarium of Constantinople, which Papebroch quotes, describes his tomb in the church at Pergamum as flowing continually with fragrant oil and healing, and says his feast was kept in the capital at the church of the Apostle John near the great church. ⁶ Alban Butler records only that he suffered at Pergamum, "where his tomb was famed for miracles in after ages." ⁸

The same synaxarium adds a detail to his last prayer that the Acts do not have: that those who kept his memory might be spared illness, and above all the torment of toothache. ⁶

The bull itself, according to the Byzantine chronicler Cedrenus, whom Papebroch cites, was brought from Pergamum to Constantinople among the ornaments Theodosius the Great gathered for the city, and was the furnace in which Antipas was burned. ⁶ Vailhé records, without connecting it to Antipas, that in 610 the body of the emperor Phocas "was burned in a brazen ox brought from Pergamus." ⁷

None of the sources consulted for this page names Saint Antipas as the patron saint of anything, and the page does not supply a patronage. ⁸¹⁰ The nearest thing is the prayer the Constantinople synaxarium puts in his mouth, asking that those who honored his memory be kept from illness and especially from toothache. ⁶

Saint Antipas's feast day is April 11. The current Roman Martyrology, as the Italian bishops print it, commemorates on that day at Pergamum in Asia, in modern Turkey, Saint Antipas, a faithful witness, as Saint John says in the Apocalypse, who suffered martyrdom for the name of Jesus. ¹⁰ The 1897 English Martyrology has him on the same day, and so do Butler and the Acta Sanctorum. ⁶⁸⁹

The date is Greek. Papebroch says the Latin calendars learned of the feast from the Greek, through Luigi Lipomano's collection of lives; Molanus added it to his edition of Usuard in 1568, dropped it in 1579, and restored it in 1583 after seeing a printed Greek calendar. ⁶ Galesinius and Canisius followed him, and Cardinal Baronius then entered Antipas in the revised Roman Martyrology, citing the Greek Menology. ⁶

The Church knows almost nothing of Antipas for certain except his name and the words Christ used of him. ¹² They are the words Revelation uses for Christ himself, "the faithful witness," and they are given to a man about whom the book says nothing else. ³

His death was remembered first by the church that saw it. The letter to Pergamum praises the Christians there for not denying the faith "even in those days," and asks the same of them again: the verse that remembers him is also a call to the ones still living in that city. ¹²

The later story fills in what Scripture leaves blank, and its own editors did not pretend otherwise. ⁶ What it kept was the oldest part: a man in a hostile city who would not stop speaking of Christ, and who died for it. ¹⁶