Paphnutius of Jerusalem was a bishop who suffered martyrdom during the persecution of the emperor Diocletian (284-305), and is commemorated by the Orthodox Church on April 19. The surviving accounts of his life are brief and not fully harmonized; the synaxarion preserves him as a hierarch who endured many torments at the hands of the pagans before his death. Liturgically he carries the title of hieromartyr, the rank given to ordained clergy who are put to death for confessing Christ.
According to the tradition recorded in the Slavic synaxarion, Paphnutius was tortured by fire and by wild beasts and was finally beheaded by the sword. Some accounts suggest that he was originally an Egyptian bishop who suffered together with many other Egyptians who had been exiled to the mines of Palestine during the Diocletianic persecution, which would account for his association with Jerusalem and the Holy Land. After his death his relics became a source of myrrh and were glorified by miracles of healing.
A Greek tradition transmitted in the Cypriot service books gives a fuller and more elaborate narrative. By this account Paphnutius was imprisoned during the same persecution, and while in confinement encountered a group of forty notables who had been jailed over a delay in paying public taxes; he taught them the Christian faith, and when the prefect Arrian learned of it he had them burned alive while Paphnutius himself was preserved. Brought again before Arrian, the saint was condemned to be dismembered, but by tradition the parts of his body were reunited and he appeared living before his judge, a wonder that is said to have converted a company of soldiers. In this telling he at last reposed by crucifixion. The two recensions agree on his episcopal rank, the era of his martyrdom, and his feast, while differing on the manner of his death.
The veneration of Paphnutius was well established by the early medieval period: a liturgical canon in his honor was composed during the Iconoclast controversy, before the year 842, and it includes a petition asking the saint to intercede against the iconoclast heresy that was then disturbing the Church. He is to be distinguished from the better-known Saint Paphnutius the Confessor of Thebes, the Egyptian bishop who took part in the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea.
