Abstract

In the year 177, Pothinus, the bishop of Lyons, was ninety years old. He died that summer after two days of beatings at the hands of the Romans for his insistence that Christ was the Christian God. A terrible persecution had come upon the Christians of Lyons (Lugdunum to the ancient Romans), in modern France, and those of its neighboring city, Vienne, some sixteen miles south on the east bank of the Rhône. We are fortunate to have a selective record of this trial in the Letter of the Churches of Lyons and Vienne preserved for us by Eusebius in his Ecclesiastical History. 1 To the name of Pothinus, among others, we may add that of Attalus, who was burned alive in the amphitheater which lies nestled on the gentle and shaded slopes of the Croix-Rousse hill in Lyons. Maturus and Sanctus, too, were tormented there by the flames, and Blandina, after many tortures, was finally gored to death by a bull. Each sacrificed themselves in imitation of the true fleshly passion of Christ, their Incarnate-God, in hope of the bodily resurrection. So fundamental and pervasive was their resurrection-faith, that the Romans cremated the martyrs’ corpses and dispersed the ashes in the river in hopes of defeating any notion of Christians being raised bodily from their graves.