The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Martyrs' Church
Phileas of Thmuis
died c. 306Early Church
The Egyptian bishop who wrote down what he saw in the torture chambers before they killed him too.
Pictured: the era he stood in — The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer — Jean-Léon Gérôme (1863–83), public domain
Summary
- Lived died c. 306.
- Stood in The Martyrs' Church (AD 100–313).
- Hangs on The Martyrs.
- Tradition: Early Church.
The life
Phileas was a man of rank before he was a bishop. Eusebius describes him as distinguished by his public services and his standing in his own country, and by his skill in philosophy and learning, a wealthy provincial notable with a family, an estate, and a reputation. He became bishop of Thmuis, a town in the Nile delta.
When the Great Persecution reached Egypt he was arrested and held at Alexandria, and while he was in prison he wrote a letter to his congregation at home.
That letter is why he matters. Most of what survives about the persecutions is written by people who heard about them. Phileas was in the building. He describes what was done in the Alexandrian courts to the Christians brought in with him: men hung by one arm from the ceiling until the joints tore; men with their arms bound behind them to a pillar while machines drew them out; the sides and stomach and legs raked; some who died under it; some cut down and thrown back into prison to be brought out again.
He notes, carefully, that the magistrates were not restrained by any of it, and that some Christians were beaten with their faces to the ground while others were beaten with their faces up. He writes it in plain sentences, as testimony.
Eusebius quoted the letter into his Church History, and that is how it comes down.
Phileas's own trial is preserved separately. A Latin account and a Greek papyrus found in Egypt in the twentieth century, the Bodmer papyrus, both record his interrogation by the prefect Culcianus, and the two versions agree closely enough to show they go back to court records.
The transcript is a strange, patient conversation. Culcianus did not want to kill him. He kept offering ways out: sacrifice, or say you have sacrificed; think of your wife; think of your children; Paul was uneducated, was he not; was your Christ God. Phileas answered every question and refused every exit. When his own family and the officials of the court begged him to have pity on himself, he answered that Christ's apostles and martyrs were his kindred.
He was beheaded, with a Roman official named Philoromus who had spoken up for him from the crowd and was condemned on the spot. The date is usually given as about 306, with 307 also argued.
Sources: Eusebius, Church History VIII.9–10; the Acts of Phileas and Papyrus Bodmer XX (the Greek Apology of Phileas); the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, article St. Phileas.
What was happening while he lived3 moments · AD 100–313
- 250Decius orders the whole empire to sacrificeFor the first time the persecution was universal by decree: every inhabitant had to sacrifice before a commission and receive a signed certificate proving it. About forty-odd of those certificates have been dug up in Egypt on papyrus, ordinary paperwork of a very hard year. Fabian, bishop of Rome, was killed in January 250; thousands of others simply signed and lived, and the church spent the next decade arguing about what to do with them.
- 257–260Valerian targets the leadershipValerian went after the church's structure rather than the crowd: bishops, priests, and deacons first, then Christians of senatorial and knightly rank, and the cemeteries where they met. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, was beheaded on September 14, 258; Sixtus II of Rome was seized in a catacomb the same year. When Valerian was captured by the Persians, his son Gallienus reversed the policy in 260, and the church got about forty years of quiet.
- 303–311Eight years of pressure, and the handers-overSome clergy surrendered the Scriptures to be burned to save their people, and were afterward called handers-over, *traditores*, the root of our word traitor. Eusebius, who lived through it, describes executions in Palestine and Egypt in numbers he says he saw with his own eyes. The bitterness over who had held firm would split the North African church in the next era.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Phileas of Thmuis at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
An Egyptian bishop who wrote down exactly what he saw in the torture chambers before they killed him too.
Hangs on The Martyrs: The witnesses who paid with their lives, from the arena at Carthage to the present day, and the confessors who paid with everything short of their lives.
Standing beside himThe Martyrs' Church · 40 on this stretch of wall
A 22-year-old mother who kept a diary in prison and walked into the arena at Carthage singing.
Stayed with his people through plague and persecution, then walked to his own beheading and paid the executioner.
Traced his teaching straight back to the apostle John through Polycarp, and wrote the first great takedown of the gnostics.
Kept wearing his philosopher's cloak after he met Christ, argued the faith to the emperor's face, and was beheaded for it.
Wanted to die with his martyred father as a boy, and spent the rest of his life laying six versions of the Old Testament side by side.
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The lawyer who gave the church the word Trinity and told Rome that the blood of the martyrs is seed.