Polycarp is read about 826 times a day, in 55 languages.
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Something wrong?A second-century bishop who died tied to a stake in Smyrna - first burned, then stabbed when the flames wouldn't take. The account of his execution became one of early Christianity's foundational martyr texts.
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About this person
Born in AD 69, Polycarp learned directly from John the Apostle, one of the twelve who knew Jesus, and was later ordained bishop of Smyrna by John himself. Church historians Irenaeus and Tertullian both traced this lineage, placing Polycarp among the three chief Apostolic Fathers alongside Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch - figures who bridged the apostles and the institutional church. In 155, at roughly eighty-six years old, he was arrested and sentenced to burning. When the fire failed to consume him, according to the Martyrdom of Polycarp, he was stabbed to death. The manner of his death and the written account that followed secured his place as a saint across Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Oriental Orthodoxy, Lutheranism, and Anglicanism.
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