Maruthas Spreads the Faith in Persia

About this same time it happened that Christianity spread in Persia, for the following reasons. Embassies were frequently sent back and forth between the rulers of Persia and the Roman empire, since there was always some occasion for them. At that time necessity led the Roman emperor to send Maruthas, bishop of Mesopotamia, whom I mentioned earlier, on a mission to the king of the Persians. The king found great piety in the man, treated him with great honor, and listened to him as to one truly loved by God. This roused the jealousy of the magi, who have great influence over the Persian monarch, for they feared he would persuade the king to embrace Christianity. Maruthas had by his prayers cured the king of a violent headache that had long troubled him and that the magi had been unable to relieve. [a]

So the magicians resorted to a trick. The Persians worship fire, and the king used to pay his worship, in a certain building, to a fire kept burning perpetually. The magi hid a man under the sacred hearth and ordered him to cry out, at the time of day when the king usually performed his devotions: “The king should be thrown out, because he is guilty of impiety in imagining that a Christian priest is loved by the Deity.” When Yazdegerd, for that was the king’s name, heard these words, he resolved to send Maruthas away, in spite of the reverence he felt for him. But Maruthas, being truly a man who loved God, saw through the fraud of the magi by the earnestness of his prayers. So he went to the king and said to him: “Do not be deceived, O king. When you go into that building again and hear the same voice, search the ground underneath and you will discover the fraud. It is not the fire that speaks; it is a human trick.” The king accepted Maruthas’s advice and went as usual to the little house where the ever-burning fire was. When he heard the same voice again, he ordered the hearth to be dug up, and the impostor who was speaking the supposed words of the Deity was found. Angry at the deception they had attempted, the king ordered that the tribe of the magi be decimated, one man in every ten put to death. When this had been done, he allowed Maruthas to build churches wherever he wished, and from that time the Christian religion spread among the Persians.

Maruthas was then recalled and went to Constantinople, but not long afterward he was sent again as ambassador to the Persian court. Once more the magi devised schemes to keep the king, by every possible means, from giving him an audience. One of their devices was to make a most disgusting smell where the king used to go, and then to accuse the Christians of causing it. But the king, who already had reason to suspect the magi, examined the matter very carefully and closely, and again the authors of the nuisance were found out. So he punished several of them and held Maruthas in still higher honor. He had much regard for the Romans as a nation and valued their goodwill very highly. Indeed he almost embraced the Christian faith himself, when Maruthas, together with Abdas, bishop of Persia, gave another practical proof of its power: these two, by giving themselves to much fasting and prayer, had cast out a demon that possessed the king’s son. But the death of Yazdegerd kept him from making an open profession of Christianity. The kingdom then passed to his son Bahram, in whose time the treaty between the Romans and the Persians was broken, as we will relate a little later.