MARTYRS THEODORA AND DIDYMUS

On June 9, the Church honors the memory of the holy martyrs Theodora and Didymus. The saints suffered for Christ during the Great Persecution of Diocletian. They were Egyptian Christians; their suffering took place in Alexandria at the beginning of the fourth century.

The live of the saints, in the case of martyrs we are talking about a written document called “passio”, has been preserved in ancient form. As researchers tell us, it has reached us without any significant changes. Such monuments are worthy of being reread, like a prayer. At the same time, reading is an instruction in how they lived, how they loved, what they relied on and, most importantly, what the ancient Christians believed in.

According to the life, Theodora was a virgin dedicated to God. She did not belong to any institution or community, since in the first three centuries of the Christian era, as a rule, such did not exist. The dedication of Theodora is indicated by her very name, which is translated from Greek as “given by God.” It is quite possible that we are dealing with the name of a saint in heavenly glory, a kind of “metaphysical pseudonym”. As is known from martyrdoms, believers often hid their names from the pagans, calling themselves simply “Christians”.

Diocletian’s first edict against Christians, which began the persecution, was issued on February 24, 303. Theodora was arrested, brought to trial and interrogated. The appropriate official provided a positive recommendation for her, that she was a free, noble and respectable citizen. Theodora’s answers during the interrogation represent a consistent, detailed Christian confession. From it we can learn how every day and ordinary things can be perceived as a consequent revelation of the mystery of our salvation.

“Are you free or a slave?” asked the official. “I told you,” Theodora answered, “that I am a Christian. Christ, having come into the world, has freed me from sin; for I was born of glorious parents in this vain world.”

Obviously, as a decent, free, young, beautiful, unmarried woman, the saint represented a special value in the eyes of Roman society. Because her deliberately solitary way of life and refusal to marry, in addition to the fact that she was a Christian, caused not only surprise among Roman officials, but also plunged them into rage.

The judge tried to persuade Theodora, threatened her with execution, promised to hand her over to a brothel, thereby desecrating her virginity. The saint’s answer is remarkable, clear in its Christian anthropology and biblical argumentation. “God knows my intention to preserve my virginity in purity. Therefore, this will not be adultery for my body but will be violence and suffering. If you cut off my head, or hand, or foot, or forcibly deprive me of my virginity, you will thereby make me not a harlot, but a martyr.” Theodora was given three days to think it over, after which, seeing the firmness of the saint, she was handed over to the brothel under guard. At the entrance to the room where she was, a line of men formed. Obsessed with pagan superstitions, they argued over who would enter her first.

At this time, a certain young man named Didymus came to the entrance of the brothel. The life says that for the sake of saving Theodora and being a Christian, he dressed in military clothes. However, nothing prevents us from believing that he was in fact a Roman soldier. A significant number of ancient Christian martyrs from the officers and soldiers of the Roman army, as well as the latest research confirm, that Christ was extremely beloved in the Roman Army. Soldiers, even pagans, were very attracted to the ideal of the Innocent Sufferer. He is the Harvester of Sorrow - let us call Him so, paraphrasing the title of a famous Metallica song.

Of those who fought among themselves for the right to enter the Christian maiden first, no one dared to resist Didymus, a powerful, armed Roman soldier. He gave Theodora his military clothes. She calmly left, remaining unnoticed. “When you leave here, cover your face as if you were ashamed, because everyone leaves here with shame; then no one will recognize you.” Life calls Didymus “a youth,” but the words that it puts into his mouth indicate that he knew people very well, their habits and customs, and that he himself was an experienced man. When the deception was revealed, the investigation began.

The name “Didymus” is translated from Greek as “twin”. History has preserved for us the works of the great Alexandrian theologian Didymus the Blind (313-398). Blind since the age of five, Didymus knew the Scriptures by heart and taught all his life. He left behind magnificent theological texts, some of which, due to the depth of their content and the strength of their dogmatic argumentation, tradition even attributed to Basil the Great. Didymus the Blind was born just ten years after the martyrdom of Didymus and Theodora. It is possible that this great blind theologian was named after Didymus the Martyr. But this is only speculation.

The Gospel calls Apostle Thomas Didymus, that is, “twin”. There are many explanations for this. One of them suggests that he was strikingly similar to Christ in appearance. When, after His Resurrection, the Lord entered the disciples, the doors of the house where they were meeting were locked (John 20:19). Thomas was not with them. Therefore, if Christ had entered in the usual way and had not given the disciples the Holy Spirit with the promise of the gift of forgiving and releasing sins, the disciples themselves could have assumed that the one who entered was not Jesus, but Thomas. Thus, the story of Thomas’s unbelief and his assurance takes on additional contours. The Holy Spirit is the one who proves the Resurrection.

The soldier Didymus, who had substituted for Theodora, was sentenced to beheaded with a sword for forgery, for refusing to hand over Theodora and confessing the name of Christ, so that the body would be burned. The Egyptian pagans, like the Bolsheviks in different parts of the globe, in Europe and Asia, were obsessed with the idea of ​​physical immortality and mummification techniques. They were convinced that the immediate destruction of the body meant the extreme humiliation of the deceased, his final mortification.

The story told in the life did not end there. The news of the upcoming execution of the Roman soldier who saved her reached Theodora and she appeared again, this time at the place of execution. A dispute broke out between them about the right to suffer for Christ and to become a martyr for confessing. “Although you have saved me from desecration, I did not ask you to save me from death. I was the first to be taken, the first to be tortured and judged. Grant me a martyr’s death,” said Theodora. “Do not hinder me from dying, condemned to death. I will die for Christ and wash away my sins with my blood,” answered Didimus.

Such an amazing dialogue and paradoxical revelation of Christ’s words that there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for another (John 15:13). The other is the neighbor for whom a Christian is ready to really suffer, the other is Christ Himself, Who, once and for all, was crucified for the life of the world; Finally, the other is man himself, myself, the skin in which I live, breathe and wander.

Saints Didim and Theodora, the virgin first, and the soldier after her, were beheaded, and their bodies were burned. The pagans did as they had promised. The saints received crowns of victory from the Lord. The burial ashes mixed and became holy relics.

Finally, in its most tragic dramatic form, the life does not miss the opportunity to share with readers a “quantum of irony.” When the pagans, arguing at the gates of the brothel, which for a time became the dungeon of Theodora’s humiliation, entered her, they saw a man, a soldier, instead of her. “What is this? How did a maiden turn into a man? I heard that once Christ, as Christians say, turned water into wine, but now I see that He turned the female sex into the male.” Such a prophetic warning from ancient times against gender change and the invasion of the sphere of God’s sovereignty, which modernity so strives for. It sounds imperceptibly, inexorably inevitably, as from the lips of fools in Christ. It was not in vain that Apostle Paul called the Wisdom of God foolishness. “Give me a place in the death of a martyr,” let us remember these words.