Acts of the Martyrs

Set of early Christian texts

Acts of the Martyrs (Latin Acta Martyrum) are accounts of the suffering and death of a Christian martyr or group of martyrs. These accounts were collected and used in church liturgies from early times as attested by Saint Augustine. These accounts vary in authenticity. The most reliable are from accounts of trials, but very few of them have survived. Perhaps the best example is the account of Saint Cyprian. The account of the Scillitan Martyrs is based on trial records, although some claim it has been embellished with miraculous and apocryphal material.

Dispensing from the first records collected, which are incomplete and are already considered lost, it can be said that the first compiler was Eusebius of Cesarea, of whom the title of the writing of martyribus is known, which unfortunately has been lost. On the other hand, Martyribus Palestinae is preserved. This was the only collection known in Rome during the sixth century, in the time of St. Gregory the Great, as the Pope himself informed the bishop and patriarch of Alexandria, Eulogio, who had requested documentation about the collections of Gesta Martyrum. At almost the same time, a great martyrology was forming, called Jeronimiano, with the commemorations of all the martyrs, which grouped the oldest martyrologies of the churches. This fact is important because the compilation of many of the passions is intimately related to this martyrology, which served as a starting point. Later, parallel to the disclosure of the narratives of the Gesta Martyrum, there was a need to synthesize them into succinct stories, including those in the most known martyrologies at that time: those composed by Saint Bede the Venerable in the eighth century and Florus of Lyon, Atto and Usuard in the ninth century. These had at their disposal the data of the passions and adapted them to the liturgical commemoration of the calendar; some of them, especially Adón, had no critical concern and used the texts without evaluating them, confusing and distorting data and news. Because of such information, these medieval martyrologies were called historical martyrologies. Something similar happened in the Eastern Church, where the numerous passions were collected in abbreviated form in the liturgical books, for example, in the saints (menaea), in which an appointment was introduced for each day of the 12 months of the year about the life and martyrdom of the saint. The same happened with the menologies (menology), also divided into 12 volumes, corresponding to the 12 months of the year; in them the passions are synthesized in a more extensive way than in the preceding ones. In the tenth century, Symeon the Metaphrast composed a menology, reading, transcribing, and adapting fragments of ancient passions, some of which only survive through him. During the Late Middle Ages, numerous collections of Lives of Saints, Passionists, Legendaries, etc. were made, which are still found in various codices of European libraries; others, on the other hand, were recast arbitrarily in other compilations later printed and translated in vulgar language; thus constituting a copious literature that reaches until the Renaissance.

It is difficult to determine the authenticity of the Acta Martyrum. The first attempt to determine the authentic records was that of Benedictine Thierry Ruinart, who collected and published 117 texts that he considered genuine. These were not of equal provenance, since only 74 contained the text of the passions, while the rest were paragraphs and fragments taken from old Christian writers like Eusebio, John Chrysostom, Basil and Prudentius, whose hymns had extracted paragraphs about the martyrs Hippolytus of Rome and Saint Lawrence. In most cases they are historical figures, but the selection of the texts was not systematic, nor was it accompanied by a critical analysis. The Benedictine, who had a rather vague idea of the purpose of its collection, only intended to make known the oldest and most trustworthy document for each of the martyrs, with the intention of excluding falsified documents. The criterion of Le Blant is not firm and shows once again how difficult it is to authenticate records; the various authentic Acta Martyrum lists, which other authors have sketched or compiled later,