The edict against the books The Deacon With the Book
Editor's note
The persecution Diocletian began in 303 opened not with executions but with a book confiscation. The first edict ordered the churches demolished and the Scriptures handed over and burned. The clergy who complied were called traditores, the handers-over, and the word became a permanent insult. Euplus is the man who did the opposite, out loud, at the door of the governor's court.
He was a deacon of the church of Catania, on the eastern coast of Sicily under the shadow of Etna. Nothing survives of his life before the trial: not his parents, not his age, not how long he had served. What survives is a transcript.
In the spring of the year three hundred and four he came to the governor's council chamber carrying the book of the Gospels, stood outside the doors where he could be heard, and called out that he was a Christian and wished to die for it. The officers brought him in. The governor was Calvisianus, and the first question was the obvious one: what was he carrying.
He said it was the holy Gospels. He was asked whose they were, and whether he knew the edict, and whether he knew that possession of the books was itself the offense. He said he knew, and that he had them because he was a Christian, and that he could not give them up and live. He was ordered to read from them, and he did, and the passages he chose are given in the Acts.
The sentence
The next chapter opens when you reach the end.