The Egyptian martyrs
Mass martyrdom under Diocletian in Egypt
Eusebius of Caesarea is present in Egypt during part of the Diocletianic persecution, and what he sees there marks him for life.
Egypt produces more martyrs in the Diocletianic persecution than anywhere else in the empire. The reasons are partly administrative — the governor of Egypt is particularly zealous — and partly demographic — the Christian population in Egypt is dense, especially in Alexandria and the surrounding villages.
Eusebius describes watching executions in groups. Not one at a time, not the individual dramatic confrontations of the earlier persecutions, but batches — ten at a time, twenty at a time, day after day. The executioners grow tired. The axes become dull.
He describes a scene that stays in the memory: condemned Christians, about to be executed, encouraging each other, singing as they approach the block, extending their necks eagerly. He is not embellishing. This was a thing that multiple witnesses observed and recorded with the same mixture of astonishment and grief.
The Egyptian Christian tradition will preserve these martyrs as the great cloud of witnesses who established the Coptic church in blood. The Coptic calendar — still in use today — is dated from the beginning of Diocletian's reign, the era of the martyrs. Year One in the Coptic church begins with the man who tried hardest to destroy it.
They are saying something with that calendar. They are saying: we remember. We date our existence by what you did to us, and we are still here.
“We beheld with our own eyes the houses of prayer cast down to their foundations from the top and the inspired and sacred Scriptures committed to the flames in the midst of the market-places.”
— Eusebius of Caesarea, Church History VIII.2, c. 313 AD
“I told him, My lord, you know. He said to me, These are those who came out of the great oppression. They washed their robes, and made them white in the Lamb's blood.”
The Coptic church dates its calendar from the beginning of the reign of the emperor who tried to destroy it.
This is one of the most defiant acts of memory in human history. They took the worst thing that happened to them and made it the starting point of how they count time. Not the founding of the church, not the resurrection — the persecution. Because from inside the tradition, the persecution and the resurrection are the same kind of event: death that doesn't end the story.
What is the worst thing that has happened to your community that you have not yet found a way to remember redemptively? Not to minimize it — to carry it forward as part of the story rather than the end of it.