martyrdom · 155 · Smyrna
The police captain met him on the road and asked what harm it was to say Lord Caesar and offer the incense. In the stadium the proconsul pressed him to swear and to revile Christ, and he answered that he had served him eighty-six years and that he had done him no wrong, and asked how he could blaspheme his king who saved him. He asked to be bound rather than nailed to the stake, saying the one who gave him strength to endure the fire would give him strength to stay in it. The account says the flames arched round him like a sail and would not touch him, so a confector was sent in with a dagger. His own church wrote all this down for the church at Philomelium within about a year, which is why it is the earliest martyr-act anyone has and why the page keeps it as historical rather than traditional. The bones they gathered were, they wrote, more precious than costly stones and finer than gold.
To make the aged bishop swear by the genius of Caesar and say Away with the atheists, which he did — pointing at the crowd.
A relic cult, a written account within the year, and the pattern every later martyr-act copied.