The Legend of St Judah Cyriacus

On May 4th, the Martyrology contains a seemingly very ordinary entry about a saint named Cyriacus: “At Jerusalem (the birth into heaven) of St Cyriacus the bishop, who was slain there under Julian the Apostate when he was visiting the holy places.” But behind this there lies a rather remarkable hagiographical confusion, which is connected to the previous day’s feast of the Holy Cross.

The fifteenth bishop of Jerusalem, and the last man of Jewish descent to hold that office, was a certain Judah, who is mentioned in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History (IV.5). He is also traditionally said to be a descendant of the Lord’s family, the great-grandson of the Apostle Jude, and was therefore known by the epithet “Kyriakos”, meaning “of the Lord.” Eusebius also says that he lived at the time of the second great rebellion of the Jews against Roman rule (132-35), known after its leader as the Bar-Kochba rebellion. After this was put down, Jews were forbidden to live in the city, and this he could no longer serve as its bishop; he was therefore replaced by a man named Marcus, and lived out his days in Galilee.

(Pictured right: St Judah Cyriacus, 1620-25, by the Venetian painter Iacopo Negretti (1548/50-1628), commonly known as Palma il Giovane; in the sacristy of the Jesuit church of the Assumption in Venice. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.)

But Kyriakos, written as “Cyriacus” in Latin, was not an unusual name among Christians in the ancient world. There are twelve others who bear it listed in the Martyrology, (plus three women named Cyriaca), and three others who are called by a slightly latinized form “Quiriacus.” One of these is a bishop of the city Ancona, a city on the Adriatic coast of Italy, about 166 miles to the north-northeast of Rome, who is supposed to have lived in the mid-4th century. And somehow, despite the two centuries that separate them in time, he was confused with the Lord’s kinsman who bears his name as an epithet.

Per se, this is not a particularly unusual thing. Much of what the Middle Ages knew of ancient history, especially regarding less prominent figures such as a random bishop of a small port city, was mixed up in a giant chronological muddle. A similar and very famous confusion took place between a missionary named Dionysius sent to Gaul in the mid-3rd century and his Biblical namesake in the latter part of Acts 17. But what makes this case so interesting is how it became tangled up with the story of the finding of the True Cross.

An aerial view of the cathedral of Ancona, dedicated to St Judah Cyriacus, from a postcard made in the 1960s. The local tradition holds that the relics of the Saint were given to the city by the Roman Empress Galla Placidia in the first half of the 5th century. 

After the Bar-Kochba rebellion, the Romans destroyed the ancient city of Jerusalem in a very Roman fashion, by basically choosing a level, shaving off everything higher than that level, and building a giant platform, on top of which they then constructed a new city. This meant that the city that Our Lord and his apostles knew, including Calvary and the tomb, was essentially buried under it. After that point, although the Church might well have preserved the memory of the places where the events narrated in the Gospels and Acts happened, the original sites would no longer have been accessible.

In his wonderful novel Helena, a fictionalized account of the holy empress’ life and the finding of the Cross, Evelyn Waugh describes this situation very beautifully. Helena asks the writer Lactantius how the Church knows that the events of the Lord’s life really took place, and he replies:

“We have the accounts written by witnesses. Besides that there is the living memory of the Church. We have knowledge handed down from father to son, invisible places marked by memory – the cave where he was born, the tomb where his body was laid, the grave of Peter. … If you want to visit the holy places you must find the right man. He can tell you, so many paces to the east from such and such a stone, where the shadow falls at sunrise on such and such a day. A few families know these things and they see to it that their children learn the instructions. One day when the Church is free and open there will be no need for such devices.”

St Helena, 1495, by Cima da Conegliano. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

Now the Church historian Sozomen reports (II.1) that the location of Calvary was “disclosed by a Hebrew who dwelt in the East, and who derived his information from some documents which had come to him by paternal inheritance.” This may well represent a memory of the Lord’s family keeping record of the place, such as the aforementioned Judah Kyriakos, although Sozomen himself doubted the truth of the story.

But in the early medieval retelling of the story, the version which carries over into the Golden Legend, when St Helena went to find the Cross, some of the Jewish leaders knew where it was, but refused to tell her, so she threatened to have them all burned alive. They therefore handed over to her one of their number, a man named Judah, whom she had lowered into a well and left for several days, until he agreed to reveal its location. This distasteful episode furnished the antiphons for Lauds, Vespers and the minor Hours of the Finding of the Cross in the pre-Tridentine Roman Breviary; the second, for example, reads, “Then she ordered them all to be burned, but they, being fearful, handed over Judas, alleluia.” (In Clement VIII’s revision of the Tridentine Breviary, these antiphons were all replaced with those of the Exaltation.)

Judah being lowered into the well, part of the cycle of paintings which depict the legend of the Cross by Piero della Francesca (after 1447), in the basilica of St Francis in Arezzo.

The story goes on that this Judah converted to Christianity, eventually became bishop of Jerusalem, and was then martyred under Julian the Apostate. And thus we find the following passage in William Durandus’ entry on the Finding of the Cross.

“The cross was found at the time of Pope Eusebius by the blessed Helena the mother of Constantine, with the assistance of Judah, who was then a Jew… (of whom) it is read that, having converted to the faith, he afterwards was made bishop of Jerusalem, and having changed his name, was called Quiriacus. It is said that the devil prophesied about him, ‘A Judah handed Christ over to death, but this Judah exalted him when he was dead… but Julian, my servant and friend, will soon be king, and avenge me upon this one.’ This took place when a monk called Julian, apostatizing from the order, by crime required attained the Roman consulship, and thence having become emperor, and a persecutor of the Christians, afflicted him with various punishments and ordered him to be killed. It is also said that a certain soldier by the name of Quiriacus afterwards killed Julian, from whose tomb in Constantinople there comes forth an intolerable stench.” (Rat. Div. Off. VII, 11, 3-5)

The Martyrdom of St Judah Quiriacus, depicted on an altar frontal of the 12th century in Catalonia, now in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya. (Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.) 

Picturesque as this story may be, no part of it can possibly be true, and it should stand as a caution about the uncritical acceptance of hagiographical legends, even when they come from the pen of a luminary like Durandus. There was indeed a Pope called Eusebius, who reigned for 19 months in the years 309-10, well before St Helena went to the Holy Land. The emperor Julian the Apostate was, of course, never a monk; his brief reign (Nov. 361 – June 363) falls entirely within the much longer tenure of a bishop of Jerusalem called Cyril (350 ca. – 386), who outlived him by twenty-three years, and is, of course, a Saint and Doctor of the Church. (Cyril is “Kyrillos” in Greek, which might well have been confused with “Kyriakos” in some way.)

There is no solid historical foundation for the tradition that a Christian soldier killed Julian, but in the East, where this tradition is accepted, the soldier’s name is given as Mercurius, not Quiriacus or one of its variants. Julian was originally buried in the city of Tarsus in modern Turkey, but later moved to Constantinople. The Byzantine chronicler John Zonaras (ca. 1070 – 1140) reports that his sarcophagus stood in a colonnade near the church of the Twelve Apostles. This church was also the imperial mausoleum, and it is difficult to imagine the emperors leaving near it anything that emitted an intolerable stench.

A porphyry sarcophagus which is believed to have been that of Julian the Apostate, which is now in the Istanbul Archeological Museum in Constantinople. (Image from Wikimedia Commons by Apaleutos25, CC BY-SA 4.0.)