The life of St Photini the Samaritan Woman
Eastern Christian tradition later gave her a name to match that turning, Photini, meaning the enlightened or luminous one, said to have been given her by the Apostles when she was baptized after Pentecost.
Beyond what the Gospel itself records, tradition tells a much fuller and later story: that she went on preaching alongside her two sons and five sisters, carrying the Gospel as far as Carthage in North Africa, until the reign of the emperor Nero brought her family's arrest and transport to Rome for refusing to renounce their faith. That same tradition holds she was finally put to death by being thrown down a well in the year 66, an end later storytellers heard as its own quiet echo of the well where her own faith had first begun, and credits her even with bringing Nero's own daughter to belief in Christ during her imprisonment.
Her memory is kept on different days in different traditions, a mark of how widely her story spread across the Christian world.
