Sabbas the Goth

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Sabbas the Goth
Born	341^{[citation needed]}, Buzău river valley, Romania
Died	372, Buzău river valley, Romania
Venerated in	Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodox Church, Roman Catholic Church
Feast	12 April
Saints Portal

Sabbas (Sava, Saba, or Savva) the Goth is a martyr and Christian saint.

[edit] Biography

He was born in 334 to Christian parents in a village in the Buzău river valley and lived in Wallachia in what is now Romania. His Act of Martyrdom states that he was a Goth by race. He may have been a cantor or a reader reader there.

In the year 371, a Gothic ruler started repressing Christianity in his area. When his agents came to the village where Sabbas lived, they forced the villagers to eat sacrificial meat. Pagan villagers wanting to help their Christian neighbours had tricked the authorities by exchanging the sacrificial meat by meat that had not been sacrificed. However, Sabbas made a conspicuous show a rejecting the meat altogether. His fellow villagers then exiled him, but after a while he was allowed back. When the Gothic noble returned and asked if there were any Christians about, Sabbas stepped forward and said, “'Let no-one swear an oath on my behalf. I am a Christian.” Sabbas neighbours then said that he was a poor man of no account. The leader then dismissed him, saying, “This one can do us neither good nor harm.”

The next year (372),^[1] Sabbas celebrated Easter with the priest Sansalas. Someone reported this, and three days after Easter Atharidus, the son of the Gothic king Rothesteus arrived in the village to arrest Sansalas and take him to higher authorities. Sabbas, however, was tortured on the spot. They dragged Sabbas naked through thorn bushes, bound him and the priest to trees and forced them to eat food that had been sacrificed to idols. Both men refused to touch the meat.

The pagan Gothic prince Athanaric, at war with Emperor Valens of Rome,^{[dubious – discuss]} sentenced Sabbas to death, and he went off with the soldiers praising God the whole way, denouncing the pagan and idolatrous ways of his captors and scorning them. The commander ordered Sabbas to be thrown in a river, tying a rock around his neck and his body to a wooden pole.

His relics were taken by St Sansala and hidden by the Christians until they could be sent for safety to the Roman Empire. Here they were received by Bishop Ascholius of Thessalonica.

Basil the Great requested of the ruler of Scythia Minor, Junius Soranus, that he should send him the relics of saints and so the Dacian priests sent the relics of Sabbas to him in Caesarea, Cappadocia, in 373 or 374 accompanied by a letter, the 'Epistle of the Church of God in Gothia to the Church of God located in Cappadocia and to all the Local Churches of the Holy Universal Church'. This letter is the oldest known writing to be composed on Romanian soil and was written in Greek, possibly by St Vetranion of Tomis.

In response Basil replied with two letters to Bishop Ascholius where he extolled the virtues of Sabbas calling him an 'athlete of Christ' and 'Martyr for the truth'.

His feast day is on the date of his martyrdom, April 15. The Eastern Orthodox Church commemorates him as "the holy, glorious, and right-victorious Great-martyr Sabbas."

Martyred in the reign of Valentinian and Valens, he is commemorated on April 15 in the Eastern Orthodox Churches and April 28 in the Roman Martyrology.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

^ According to the Passion, in the consulate of Modestus and Arintheus.
Heather, Peter, and Matthews, John, Goths in the Fourth Century, p. 109, n. 38.