The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Martyrs' Church
Pope Urban I
died c. 230Early Church
The bishop who led the Roman church through the uneasy quiet between two waves of killing.
Summary
- Lived died c. 230.
- Stood in The Martyrs' Church (AD 100–313).
- Hangs on The Martyrs.
- Tradition: Early Church.
The life
Urban became bishop of Rome in 222, succeeding Callistus, and held the office until 230. His eight years fell in one of the strangest windows in the history of the early church: a stretch of official calm, sandwiched between persecutions, in which Christianity was still illegal and almost nobody was being killed for it.
The reason was the emperor. Severus Alexander came to the throne the same year Urban was elected, and his mother Julia Mamaea, who effectively governed, had a documented interest in Christianity, she had summoned Origen to come and explain it to her. The Roman biographer Lampridius reports that Severus Alexander kept images of Abraham and of Christ in his private shrine alongside Orpheus and Apollo, and that he had a saying he liked from the Christians, do not do to another what you would not have done to you, inscribed on the palace wall.
He is also said to have ruled in a property dispute that a piece of public land should go to the Christians rather than to a guild of tavern-keepers, on the ground that any worship of God was better than a bar.
That is the world Urban administered. The church of Rome grew, its clergy multiplied, its cemeteries expanded, and the fight that had torn it apart under Callistus, Hippolytus and his rival congregation, went on without resolution through Urban's whole term.
What he personally did is not recorded. The Liber Pontificalis attributes to him the conversion of Valerian, the husband of Cecilia, and a decree about silver liturgical vessels; both come from a later legendary tradition, and historians do not rely on them. The martyrdom sometimes attributed to him rests on the same material and on a confusion with a different Urban buried in a different cemetery. The reign of Severus Alexander makes a martyrdom in Rome in those years unlikely.
His grave is better attested than his life. A fragment of a Greek slab reading OURBANOS E, Urban, bishop, was found in the papal crypt of the Catacomb of Callixtus, the burial chamber of the third-century Roman bishops.
He died in 230. Five years later Maximinus Thrax took the throne and the arrests began again.
Sources: Eusebius, Church History VI.21, VI.23; Liber Pontificalis; Lampridius, Life of Severus Alexander in the Historia Augusta; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, article Pope St. Urban I.
What was happening while he lived4 moments · AD 100–313
- c. 155Polycarp of Smyrna is burned in the stadiumThe old bishop had been a disciple of the apostle John. When the governor told him to curse Christ and go free, the account written by his own congregation records his answer: "Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me any injury: how then can I blaspheme my King and my Saviour?" The traditional date is 155 or 156; some scholars argue for as late as 167.
- c. 165Justin Martyr is beheaded at RomeThe philosopher who had written open letters defending Christians to two emperors was tried by the city prefect Rusticus with six companions. The court record survives as the *Acts of Justin*. Asked what teachings he held, he explained them; asked to sacrifice, he refused, and the group was scourged and beheaded.
- 177The martyrs of Lyons and VienneMob violence in Gaul turned into arrests, torture, and days in the amphitheater. The churches there wrote an account that Eusebius preserved (*Church History* 5.1). Two names stayed: Pothinus, the bishop, over ninety years old, who died in prison, and Blandina, a slave woman whose owners feared she would break first and who outlasted them all.
- c. 203Perpetua and Felicity die in the arenaVibia Perpetua, a young mother of good family in Carthage, and Felicity, a pregnant slave woman, were arrested with several companions. Perpetua kept a prison diary that survives inside *The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity*, one of the earliest firsthand writings we have from a Christian woman. Felicity gave birth in prison days before they were sent out to the beasts.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Pope Urban I at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Led the Roman church through the uneasy quiet between two waves of killing.
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.