Theodore and the Passio S. Anastasii

Abstract

The life and cult of the Persian soldier turned Christian martyr, Magundat-Anastasius, intersect at several points with what we know of the biography of Theodore of Tarsus. Magundat-Anastasius, the older of the two, was a Persian soldier who took part in the siege of Chalcedon in 614–15. Tarsus in Cilicia, Theodore's city, had been abandoned to the advancing Persians by the emperor Heraclius only three years before, when Theodore was a young boy. The cult of Anastasius spread soon after his death in 628 to Constantinople, and perhaps even Cilicia, regions closely connected with Theodore's life. By 650 at the latest, and perhaps somewhat earlier, the relic of the head of Anastasius had been brought to the Cilician monastery ad Aquas Salvias in Rome where Theodore most likely had been living as a monk before being sent to Canterbury in 668. The cult of Anastasius also reached England between the middle of the seventh century and Bede's lifetime. My purpose here is to show that it was the Greek-speaking Theodore who was responsible for introducing the cult of the Persian convert to England. New evidence suggests in fact that a Latin interlinear translation of the Greek Acta of Anastasius was found at Canterbury. It was most likely brought there by Theodore, perhaps as a gloss over the Greek. The technique of this translation and its linguistic similarities to other works only recently attributed to Theodore suggest further that this Latin version may have been executed by the future archbishop of Canterbury himself.

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