The life of St Sabbas Stratelates
When his Christian faith was discovered, tradition holds, he threw down his military belt before the emperor and declared himself a Christian outright. He was beaten, torn with iron claws, burned, and plunged into a cauldron of boiling tar, but is said to have emerged unharmed each time, and seventy fellow soldiers who witnessed this believed and were put to death for it.
Imprisoned and facing further torment, Sabbas is said to have been comforted in the night by a vision of Christ. He was finally drowned in a river at Rome in the year 272. At least one modern scholarly analysis of the surviving accounts argues that Sabbas Stratelates was not a historical person at all, but a literary double modeled on the genuinely historical Sabbas the Goth and on the martyr Procopius, composed to give Byzantium its own version of a beloved Gothic martyr's story. That argument has not been independently confirmed here and should be read as one scholar's conclusion rather than settled consensus. His memory nonetheless has long been kept by the Church.
