Beate Dignas & Engelbert Winter - Kaveh Farrokh

32 Persian Christians and Yazdgard I 221
with a double levy all the Christians who were in the dominion of the Persians.
And he wrote an edict from Bēth Hūzāyē to the governors of Bēth Arāmāyē, 64 as
follows: ‘Immediately you see this our, the gods’, commandment in this text of the
prescript which we have issued, arrest Simon the chief of the Nazarenes, and do
not release him until he has put his seal to a document and agreed upon his life
that he will collect and hand over a double poll-tax and a two-fold levy from the
whole people of the Nazraye which is in our, the gods’, land and lives under our
rule. Because we, the gods, have the hardships of war, but they have delights and
luxuries, and although they live in our land, they share the doctrine of Caesar our
enemy. These things have been written by ˇ Sāpūr the king from Bēth Hūzāyē to the
governors of Bēth Arāmāyē.’ And when the king’s edict reached them they arrested
the blessed Simon Bar Sabbāē, and these words that had been written by the king
they read out before him, and they demanded that he carry out these things that
had been written.
The passage illustrates that from ˇ Sāpūr II’s perspective the Christians were
a ‘Roman advance guard’. 65 Apparently after he had suffered setbacks in
the fight against Rome the king had intended to impose higher taxes on the
Christians in order to finance the continuing war with the Romans. Here
as elsewhere the source emphasises the close bond between the Christians
in the Sasanian Empire and their ‘fellow believer’, the Roman emperor
and enemy of the Persian king. From an Eastern perspective this situation
entailed the risk of espionage and of transmission of secret information. 66
When Simon refused to comply with the exertion of higher taxes and when
the Sasanian king feared a Christian revolt against his rule he initiated
systematic persecutions of the Christians in the entire Sasanian Empire. 67
32: The situation of the Persian Christians during the reign of
Yazdgard I (399–420)
Socrates vii.8.1–20
(1) Around this time Christianity also spread in Persia for the following reasons.
(2) Between the Romans and Persians frequent embassies constantly take place;
varied, however, are the reasons why they constantly send embassies back and
forth (3) This necessity then also at the time entailed that Mārūtā, the bishop of
Mesopotamia, whom I mentioned briefly earlier, was sent to the Persian king by
64 Bēt Hūzāyē and Bēt Arāmāyē are geographical names referring to the areas Hūzistān and
Assyria.
65 Wiesehöfer 2001: 202; cf. also 1993: 378.
66 See Shahbazi 1990: 589 who states, ‘In Iran devotion to the Christian faith thus appeared as allegiance
to a hostile political power and ˇ Sāpūr II regarded such developments as threats to the security of his
empire.’
67 Asmussen 1983: 940.