The letter from Lyon
The martyrs of Gaul
The letter was written by survivors to the churches in Asia Minor, and it begins like a dispatch from a war zone — because it is.
Lyon in 177 AD is the most important Roman city north of the Alps, a thriving commercial hub at the junction of three rivers. A Christian community has been growing there for decades, made up largely of immigrants from Asia Minor — Greek speakers in a Latin city, already outsiders before the persecution begins.
It starts with social exclusion. Christians are barred from the baths, the markets, the public spaces. Then comes the violence — Christians dragged through the streets, beaten by mobs, thrown into prison. The local governor writes to the emperor Marcus Aurelius for instructions. The emperor — the philosopher-king, the author of Meditations — responds: execute those who refuse to recant.
The letter names them. Sanctus, a deacon, who when asked his name, his city, his status, his nationality, answered everything with I am a Christian. His torturers applied red-hot plates of brass to the most sensitive parts of his body. He did not recant. His body was so swollen and inflamed that it no longer looked human. They tortured him again after it healed. He still did not recant.
Maturus. Attalus. Blandina. The letter names them one by one, this community of mostly ordinary people — slaves, freedmen, immigrants, a few of means — and describes what each of them endured and how each of them held.
The letter ends by asking the recipients to share it with other churches. They did. We are still reading it.
“Sanctus answered all their questions with 'I am a Christian' — this he confessed instead of name, city, race, and everything else, and the pagans heard no other word from him.”
— Letter of the Churches of Lyon and Vienne, 177 AD
“For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which will be revealed toward us.”
I am a Christian. Three words that contained, for Sanctus, everything worth saying — his name, his city, his identity, his allegiance.
We live in a world that gives us a thousand ways to define ourselves and puts enormous pressure on us to lead with everything except that. Our credentials. Our politics. Our affiliations. Our accomplishments.
Sanctus stood in a room where everything was being stripped away and chose three words.
What would it mean for those three words to be the truest, deepest, most load-bearing thing you could say about yourself? Not as an identity to perform, but as a reality to inhabit?