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In the 6th and 7th chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, we read about the selection and ordination of the first seven deacons and the subsequent preaching and martyrdom of St. Stephen. He died in Jerusalem c. 34 A.D. at the age of approximately 29. The text concludes: “Some devout men buried Stephen, mourning for him with loud cries.” (Acts 8: 2) This is all that was known about the remains of Stephen for centuries.
In the year 410, the city of Rome was sacked and plundered by Genseric and his ferocious Goths. It was the first time the proud empire had been so humiliated, and this at its very heart. The effects of this catastrophe cannot be overstated. For one thing, it was a prelude to the fall of the Western Empire in 453, with the deposing of the last emperor, Romulus Augustulus. More to our point is the immediate reaction of pagans, who claimed that this misfortune was the fault of the Christians, since they had turned away from the worship of the gods. In order to defend the Church against this calumny, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote his great work, “The City of God”. Such a defense must have been a great consolation to the faithful, but greater still was the heavenly consolation which came in the form of miracles. From this time began a series of supernatural prodigies, which included miraculous finding of the relics of saints, the most famous being the relics of Stephen. |
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On December 3, 415, a venerable priest named Lucianus was sleeping on his cot in the baptistery of his church in Caphargamala (Gamaliel’s Field), about twenty miles from Jerusalem. Being half awake, he saw a tall, comely old man of venerable aspect, clothed in white and gold, who approached him, called him by name, and told him to go to the bishop, John of Jerusalem, and encourage him to come with him to Caphargamala, where he would find tombs where the remains of certain servants of Christ were buried. The speaker identified himself as Gamaliel, the teacher of St. Paul. He told Lucianus that, after the death of Stephen, he and Nicodemus brought Stephen’s remains to Gamaliel’s own property and buried him there. Eventually, Nicodemus and Gamaliel were also buried in the tomb, along with Abibas (Habib), Gamaliel’s younger son. This vision recurred three Fridays in a row, after which Lucianus went to Jerusalem to see the bishop.
Bishop John was at the Council of Diospolis (Lydda) at the time, but he and the bishops Eutonius of Sebastis and Eleutherius of Jericho hastened to Caphargamala. They found the tomb. In digging up the earth there, coffins or chests were found, whereon were engraved these words in very large characters: Cheliel, Nasuam, Gamaliel, Abibas. The first two are the Syriac names of Stephen , or “crowned”, and Nicodemus, or “victory of the people”. On opening the tomb of Stephen, the earth shook, and a remarkably agreeable odor exuded from his coffin. Seventy-three people present were cured of various illnesses.
The bones of Stephen were carried back to Jerusalem and enshrined in the Basilica of Zion. Not long afterwards, a great church of St. Stephen was erected in Gaza. Then, in 421, the Empress Pulcheria sent a golden cross studded with precious stones for the church on Golgatha. In exchange, the Bishop of Jerusalem sent the Palestinian Abbot, St. Passarion with the right arm and hand of St. Stephen, which he brought to Constantinople and enshrined in her newly-built church of St. Stephen in the Daphne section of the Imperial Palace.
Pulcheria’s great rival was her sister-in-law – married to her brother, Theodosius II - the Empress Eudocia. In the year 439, Eudocia ordered the construction of the basilica of St. Stephen near the place where Stephen had been stoned (north of the Damascus Gate). She and her granddaughter were both eventually buried in this basilica. The same year, she brought additional relics of Stephen back to Constantinople and placed them in the church of St. Lawrence, until she completed the building of her own church of St. Stephen and then moved the relics there. (This church was dedicated in 439 and again in 460.) In 530, Emperor Theodosius refers to Eudocia’s basilica being outside the walls of Jerusalem. Writing in 570, the pilgrim Antonin de Plaisance reported that St. Eudocia’s remains were found there. By 650, the basilica was in ruins, due to the spread of Islam.
Eudocia’s great-granddaughter, Anicia Juliana, in a deliberate highlighting of her own imperial descent, built great churches in Constantinople, honoring the saints whose relics were first brought to the capital by Eudocia – Polyeuctos and Stephen. This would have been the St. Stephen Church in the Constantinianae. The church of St. Polyeuctos lay in the same quarter and was probably the site of the Anicii family estate and Juliana’s residence, “ta Ioulianes.”
The relics of St. Stephen were soon dispersed in many places. Some went to Hippo, where St. Augustine built a great church to enshrine them. He mentions many of the miracles associated with them. Pope St. Gregory the Great mentions a large church of St. Stephen in Ancona. Relics of St. Stephen were sent to Rome during the reign of Pope Pelagius II (d. 591) and were enshrined by him with the relics of St. Lawernce the deacon when the basilica of St. Lawrence Outside the Walls was completed.
The relics of St. Stephen which have just arrived at the Shrine of All Saints come from Mount Athos, an autonomous monastic state on a mountain and peninsula in northeastern Greece. It consists of 20 confederate Orthodox monasteries under the leadership of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. There have been monks on Mount Athos at least back to the 4th century, and perhaps even to the 3rd century. They were there during the reign of Emperor Constantine I (324-337). Churches on Mount Athos were destroyed by order of Emperor Julian the Apostate (361-363), during which time the Christians fled to the woods and other inaccessible places on the peninsula. After the Islamic conquest of Egypt in the 7th century, many Egyptian monks fled to Mount Athos. Monks from there participated in the 7th Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 787. A formal head of the community is first mentioned in 908.
The monks who have sent the relics to the Shrine of All Saints claim that they have been on Mount Athos for as far back as anyone knows – certainly from its first centuries. They were part of the treasury of St. Panteleimon Monastery – the only Russian monastery in the confederation. Among the many treasures possessed by this community are part of the skull and the jaw of St. Stephen the Protomartyr. Additionally, in a separate reliquary, they possessed the two bones which have come to the Shrine of All Saints – the bottom half of St. Stephen’s right femur, with an unhealed fracture, (which would be just right for someone stoned to death) and part of a tibia. They were sealed in their current reliquary in 1695. They were only away from Mount Athos for one year previously, but their loan was part of quite a scheme. Joseph Stalin came to power in the Soviet Union in 1922. From 1928-1941, there was an enormous persecution of Christianity in Russia – especially the Russian Orthodox Church. During that time, the number of churches was reduced from 29,584 to fewer than 500. On December 5, 1931, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow was demolished and eventually replaced with a public bath house. Most clergy and Church leaders were either shot or sent to labor camps. In 1937 alone, more than 85,000 Orthodox priests were shot.
In the meantime, things were getting increasingly worse for the monks at St. Panteleimon. Until the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian Athonite community could rely on the support of the Russian diplomatic corps in Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Athens, and Russia itself. But, with the fall of the Czar and the death of its imperial supporters, it was seriously financially bereft. The monks had also been harassed by the Greek Athonite monasteries and the Greek government; and they were treated with suspicion by the Patriarch of Constantinople. Things got worse when Greece was taken over by the Nazis during World War II. Since they were fighting Russia, the Russian monks were treated badly and allowed neither visitors nor recruits. So what had been the largest monastic community on Mount Athos was now the smallest, with most of its monks in their eighties. They were desperately poor and lacked enough food or the ability to maintain their buildings.
In 1924, the monks at St. Panteleimon made an impassioned plea to King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and to the Serbian Patriarch for assistance; but, by the time the king was assassinated in 1934, this assistance had come to an end. On March 25, 1925, the old czarist Patriarch St. Tikhon Bellavin died. His successor would have been Meropolitan Sergei Stragorodsky, but no patriarchal election was allowed. In 1927, Sergey thoroughly compromised himself by issuing a document praising the Soviet state.
Only after the German invasion of Russia in 1941 did Stalin begin to back off from persecuting the Church. He needed the patriotic support of the Church to unite the Russian people in their nationalism. By the end of World War II, Stalin thought that he could fire up everyone’s patriotism by co-opting what was left of the Church. He decided to try to unite all the branches of Orthodoxy under the Moscow Patriarch, re-making it into an Orthodox Vatican of sorts. He thought he could do this because, by this time in history, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, after centuries of Ottoman oppression, was very weak. Suddenly, Stalin needed a Patriarch of Moscow. In 1943, Metropolitan Sergei was allowed to be elected. Many churches were reopened. And, if Moscow was going to be a center of Orthodoxy, relics were needed. Most of the relics from Russian places of worship had either been destroyed or placed in museums. So a delegation was led by the Metropolitan of Leningrad and Novgorod, Sergei Vladimirovich Shimanskiy, to negotiate with St. Panteleimon Monastery, in exchange for what the monks of St. Pantaleimon declare was “a huge amount of money”, to loan some of their most precious relics to Moscow for a year. Our relics of St. Stephen were among those sent. On September 3, 1943, during an extraordinary meeting between Joseph Stalin and the Metropolitan Sergei Stragorodsky, there was an agreement signed to put an end to the persecution of the church. On September 8, 1943, the council of bishops was allowed to elect Sergei Patriarch. Stalin, who had spent many years in the seminary and had achieved high grades in most of his subjects until he pulled out shortly before ordination, was certainly no longer a believer. But he knew how to use the theological concepts of the past to harness ecclesiastical power in pursuit of the government’s intentions. Building on the fact that the Ecumenical Patriarch was living in Istanbul under Turkish oppression and was, therefore, “weakened”, Stalin apparently decided to appropriate to himself the “Third Rome” theory from czarist times. The theory of the Third Rome was first formulated by a monk named Filofei (Philotheus) of Pskov who, in 1510, wrote a famous epistle to Czar Vasili (Basil) III (d. 1533), in which he declared that, with the first Rome fallen to Apollinarianism (a heresy which denied the humanity of Christ), and Constantinople, the second Rome, fallen to the infidels, a Third Rome had sprung up in the Czar’s sovereign kingdom, a Rome would stand firm and never be followed by a fourth. Stalin’s plan was to replace the Ecumenical Patriarchate with the Moscow Patriarchate. To this end, Stalin began to send a lot of money to the Constantinople (Istanbul), actually trying to buy off the Patriarch – on the one condition that he recognize the Patriarch of Moscow as the first among equals.
Bishop John was at the Council of Diospolis (Lydda) at the time, but he and the bishops Eutonius of Sebastis and Eleutherius of Jericho hastened to Caphargamala. They found the tomb. In digging up the earth there, coffins or chests were found, whereon were engraved these words in very large characters: Cheliel, Nasuam, Gamaliel, Abibas. The first two are the Syriac names of Stephen , or “crowned”, and Nicodemus, or “victory of the people”. On opening the tomb of Stephen, the earth shook, and a remarkably agreeable odor exuded from his coffin. Seventy-three people present were cured of various illnesses.
The bones of Stephen were carried back to Jerusalem and enshrined in the Basilica of Zion. Not long afterwards, a great church of St. Stephen was erected in Gaza. Then, in 421, the Empress Pulcheria sent a golden cross studded with precious stones for the church on Golgatha. In exchange, the Bishop of Jerusalem sent the Palestinian Abbot, St. Passarion with the right arm and hand of St. Stephen, which he brought to Constantinople and enshrined in her newly-built church of St. Stephen in the Daphne section of the Imperial Palace.
Pulcheria’s great rival was her sister-in-law – married to her brother, Theodosius II - the Empress Eudocia. In the year 439, Eudocia ordered the construction of the basilica of St. Stephen near the place where Stephen had been stoned (north of the Damascus Gate). She and her granddaughter were both eventually buried in this basilica. The same year, she brought additional relics of Stephen back to Constantinople and placed them in the church of St. Lawrence, until she completed the building of her own church of St. Stephen and then moved the relics there. (This church was dedicated in 439 and again in 460.) In 530, Emperor Theodosius refers to Eudocia’s basilica being outside the walls of Jerusalem. Writing in 570, the pilgrim Antonin de Plaisance reported that St. Eudocia’s remains were found there. By 650, the basilica was in ruins, due to the spread of Islam.
Eudocia’s great-granddaughter, Anicia Juliana, in a deliberate highlighting of her own imperial descent, built great churches in Constantinople, honoring the saints whose relics were first brought to the capital by Eudocia – Polyeuctos and Stephen. This would have been the St. Stephen Church in the Constantinianae. The church of St. Polyeuctos lay in the same quarter and was probably the site of the Anicii family estate and Juliana’s residence, “ta Ioulianes.”
The relics of St. Stephen were soon dispersed in many places. Some went to Hippo, where St. Augustine built a great church to enshrine them. He mentions many of the miracles associated with them. Pope St. Gregory the Great mentions a large church of St. Stephen in Ancona. Relics of St. Stephen were sent to Rome during the reign of Pope Pelagius II (d. 591) and were enshrined by him with the relics of St. Lawernce the deacon when the basilica of St. Lawrence Outside the Walls was completed.
The relics of St. Stephen which have just arrived at the Shrine of All Saints come from Mount Athos, an autonomous monastic state on a mountain and peninsula in northeastern Greece. It consists of 20 confederate Orthodox monasteries under the leadership of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople. There have been monks on Mount Athos at least back to the 4th century, and perhaps even to the 3rd century. They were there during the reign of Emperor Constantine I (324-337). Churches on Mount Athos were destroyed by order of Emperor Julian the Apostate (361-363), during which time the Christians fled to the woods and other inaccessible places on the peninsula. After the Islamic conquest of Egypt in the 7th century, many Egyptian monks fled to Mount Athos. Monks from there participated in the 7th Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 787. A formal head of the community is first mentioned in 908.
The monks who have sent the relics to the Shrine of All Saints claim that they have been on Mount Athos for as far back as anyone knows – certainly from its first centuries. They were part of the treasury of St. Panteleimon Monastery – the only Russian monastery in the confederation. Among the many treasures possessed by this community are part of the skull and the jaw of St. Stephen the Protomartyr. Additionally, in a separate reliquary, they possessed the two bones which have come to the Shrine of All Saints – the bottom half of St. Stephen’s right femur, with an unhealed fracture, (which would be just right for someone stoned to death) and part of a tibia. They were sealed in their current reliquary in 1695. They were only away from Mount Athos for one year previously, but their loan was part of quite a scheme. Joseph Stalin came to power in the Soviet Union in 1922. From 1928-1941, there was an enormous persecution of Christianity in Russia – especially the Russian Orthodox Church. During that time, the number of churches was reduced from 29,584 to fewer than 500. On December 5, 1931, the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow was demolished and eventually replaced with a public bath house. Most clergy and Church leaders were either shot or sent to labor camps. In 1937 alone, more than 85,000 Orthodox priests were shot.
In the meantime, things were getting increasingly worse for the monks at St. Panteleimon. Until the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian Athonite community could rely on the support of the Russian diplomatic corps in Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Athens, and Russia itself. But, with the fall of the Czar and the death of its imperial supporters, it was seriously financially bereft. The monks had also been harassed by the Greek Athonite monasteries and the Greek government; and they were treated with suspicion by the Patriarch of Constantinople. Things got worse when Greece was taken over by the Nazis during World War II. Since they were fighting Russia, the Russian monks were treated badly and allowed neither visitors nor recruits. So what had been the largest monastic community on Mount Athos was now the smallest, with most of its monks in their eighties. They were desperately poor and lacked enough food or the ability to maintain their buildings.
In 1924, the monks at St. Panteleimon made an impassioned plea to King Alexander I of Yugoslavia and to the Serbian Patriarch for assistance; but, by the time the king was assassinated in 1934, this assistance had come to an end. On March 25, 1925, the old czarist Patriarch St. Tikhon Bellavin died. His successor would have been Meropolitan Sergei Stragorodsky, but no patriarchal election was allowed. In 1927, Sergey thoroughly compromised himself by issuing a document praising the Soviet state.
Only after the German invasion of Russia in 1941 did Stalin begin to back off from persecuting the Church. He needed the patriotic support of the Church to unite the Russian people in their nationalism. By the end of World War II, Stalin thought that he could fire up everyone’s patriotism by co-opting what was left of the Church. He decided to try to unite all the branches of Orthodoxy under the Moscow Patriarch, re-making it into an Orthodox Vatican of sorts. He thought he could do this because, by this time in history, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, after centuries of Ottoman oppression, was very weak. Suddenly, Stalin needed a Patriarch of Moscow. In 1943, Metropolitan Sergei was allowed to be elected. Many churches were reopened. And, if Moscow was going to be a center of Orthodoxy, relics were needed. Most of the relics from Russian places of worship had either been destroyed or placed in museums. So a delegation was led by the Metropolitan of Leningrad and Novgorod, Sergei Vladimirovich Shimanskiy, to negotiate with St. Panteleimon Monastery, in exchange for what the monks of St. Pantaleimon declare was “a huge amount of money”, to loan some of their most precious relics to Moscow for a year. Our relics of St. Stephen were among those sent. On September 3, 1943, during an extraordinary meeting between Joseph Stalin and the Metropolitan Sergei Stragorodsky, there was an agreement signed to put an end to the persecution of the church. On September 8, 1943, the council of bishops was allowed to elect Sergei Patriarch. Stalin, who had spent many years in the seminary and had achieved high grades in most of his subjects until he pulled out shortly before ordination, was certainly no longer a believer. But he knew how to use the theological concepts of the past to harness ecclesiastical power in pursuit of the government’s intentions. Building on the fact that the Ecumenical Patriarch was living in Istanbul under Turkish oppression and was, therefore, “weakened”, Stalin apparently decided to appropriate to himself the “Third Rome” theory from czarist times. The theory of the Third Rome was first formulated by a monk named Filofei (Philotheus) of Pskov who, in 1510, wrote a famous epistle to Czar Vasili (Basil) III (d. 1533), in which he declared that, with the first Rome fallen to Apollinarianism (a heresy which denied the humanity of Christ), and Constantinople, the second Rome, fallen to the infidels, a Third Rome had sprung up in the Czar’s sovereign kingdom, a Rome would stand firm and never be followed by a fourth. Stalin’s plan was to replace the Ecumenical Patriarchate with the Moscow Patriarchate. To this end, Stalin began to send a lot of money to the Constantinople (Istanbul), actually trying to buy off the Patriarch – on the one condition that he recognize the Patriarch of Moscow as the first among equals.
The relics of St. Stephen and the other relics from Mount Athos, on loan for a year were displayed from January 1, 1944 to January 1, 1945, in the Cathedral of the Epiphany in Yelokhovo, Moscow, the vicarial cathedral of the Moscow patriarchs. Sergius was enthroned on September 12th, and he died on May 15, 1944. He was succeeded by Sergei Shimanskiy, who took the name Alexei I, was elected February 2, 1945 and enthroned two days later. The Agreement for the loan of the relics was signed by Justin, hegumen of St. Panteleimon, and Alexei. The document is now in our possession. As is well known, Stalin’s plan for turning the Moscow Patriarchate into an “Orthodox Vatican” completely failed. And the persecution of the Church in Russia continued – especially under Nikita Khrushchev from 1958 to 1964– until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989. While Stalin’s plotting, which included the loan of these relics for a year, brought vital financial aid to St. Panteleimon Monastery, another pressing need led to their being permanently purchased for our shrine. The roof of the oldest cathedral on Mount Athos is in danger of collapsing, and the monks need money to have it repaired. They decided that it was time to let go of some of their most treasured items in order for this to happen.
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