The life of Abercius, Equal-to-the-Apostles
He came to be honored as Equal to the Apostles for having traveled, by his own account, remarkable distances in spreading the faith of his time, journeys that carried him as far as Rome and eastward into Syria along the Euphrates.
Almost everything known of him rests on a single object: the verse epitaph, some twenty-two lines of Greek, that he had inscribed for his own tomb. Rediscovered in broken fragments at Hierapolis in the nineteenth century and now kept in the Vatican, it names him a disciple of the Good Shepherd and speaks, in careful and allegorical language, of his journeys and of the seal of Baptism and the food of the Eucharist. A fuller narrative Life composed later, and filled out with miracle stories well beyond what the stone itself says, has been treated with considerably more caution by modern scholars than the inscription that gave rise to it, which remains one of the most important surviving witnesses to the practice of the earliest Church.
He is remembered chiefly through his own carved words, still legible after eighteen centuries.
