The Church Fathers · c. 340–380 and later
The Acts of the Persian Martyrs
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What it is
Accounts of the great persecution under Shapur II, in which Christians were taxed at double rate as suspected partisans of Rome and their clergy killed when they refused to collect it. Simeon bar Sabbae is executed with a hundred of his clergy on the eve of Good Friday.
Why it lasted
Martyrdom under a Persian king in the same decades that the Roman empire turned Christian, which breaks the tidy story in which persecution ends with Constantine. It is the founding literature of the Church of the East.
Scripture it works from
Where to read it
Public domain and free to read in full, though not held here. The archives below have it.
These open a search on each archive rather than a direct link, which is the honest way to point at an edition nobody here has checked line by line.
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