Saint John the Soldier

The Soldier from Scythia

Join me today to meet a saint who saved others, only to find they had saved him.

18th century drawing of Saint John the Soldier, usually called Saint John the Warrior in the East [Yaroslavl Museum Reserve]

Name: John

Life: 4th century AD

Status: Saint

Feast: July 29, 30 (in the East)

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It was the year 363 AD, and John was in prison for something that had only recently become a crime. The Roman Empire had started to become Christian, and now it was becoming pagan again. John, who was no one special, just another horseman from the East who had been recruited into the Roman legions, had helped the Christians who were once again on the receiving end of persecution. That was what had gotten him thrown in prison.

Christianity had existed in Rome for a long time. It had come to Rome with Saint Peter in the first century AD. For centuries, the attitude of the emperors ranged from ignoring the Church to outright persecuting it. But that had changed 50 years earlier with the Emperor Constantine, who received a vision before he went into battle, an invitation to conquer in the name of the name of God. When Constantine came to power, he declared that Christianity would be tolerated. By the end of his life, he had been baptized. Since then, Rome had been ruled by Christians, the extended family of Constantine.

In 361 another heir of Constantine had come to power. This was the athletic and intelligent young Flavius Claudius Julianus, whom we remember as Julian. But Julian had a secret. Julian had been raised a Christian, but he had lost his faith a long time ago. Julian had reverted to paganism, under the influence of philosopher-sorcerers like Maximus the Neoplatonist. And so Julian, whom we remember as Julian the Apostate, set about dismantling the Church.

Julian’s methods would be more strategic than those of many emperors before him. After all, Julian had an insider’s view of Christianity. Julian funded a pagan revival, building temples and encouraging pagan scholarship. But he also attacked the Church in ways that were more direct.

For one thing, Julian made sure to promote every troublemaker who had ever spread weird or heretical ideas in the Church: Julian wanted Christians divided. He banned Christians from the education system, arguing that it was unfair to let Christians teach the pagan history and literature of the past. Christians were stripped out of the imperial bureaucracy. Julian knew that Christians believed Jesus had prophesied the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Julian decided to rebuild the Temple - although strange earthquakes and fires would stymie the Roman engineers.

Icon of Saint John the Soldier

Julian’s actions began to have an effect. Some people had always opposed Christianity, and they welcomed the return to paganism. Christians like Saint Basil prayed for an end to this new persecution. But Julian wasn’t really aiming for the hard-liners on either side. His policies were aimed at slowly converting middle-of-the-road, ordinary people. When forced to choose between their faith and their jobs, many people chose their jobs. And by capturing the education system, Julian was confident that as time passed he would produce generations of young Romans who were as hostile to Christianity as he was.

John had found himself tangled up in these anti-Christian policies. And that was what had gotten him arrested.

We don’t know much about what John was doing before. We think his roots lay in the East. John was a Scythian. For centuries, the Scythians had lived free as horse warriors in a vast area of land stretching from Ukraine in the West to Kazakhstan in the East, up North of the great empire of the Persians. The Scythians had felled their enemies with poisoned arrows fired from horseback, or ridden them down to fight with sword and axe, then feasted with cups made from the skulls of their defeated foes. But over the centuries, the Romans had slowly absorbed some of the Scythian tribes. Civilization and Christianity were spreading through the land.

19th century icon of Saint John the Soldier

This has led some to suggest that John was himself a Christian. Maybe he was, but our sources don’t say so. Perhaps the most interesting possibility is that John was not a particularly religious man. He was just a decent man.

The Roman army was not always known for being gentle when it passed through civilian areas. John had become the soldier that civilians went to for help, because they knew he would deal honestly and fairly with them. John was known for helping the poor. And so as the Emperor Julian’s policies targeted Christians in sneaky, bureaucratic ways, John came to see Christians as exactly the sorts of underdogs he always tried to help.

Icon of John the Soldier

Julian was becoming more and more willing to do harm to Christians. For example, when the city of Nisibis, modern Nusaybin in Southeast Turkey, begged the emperor to help them against the attacks of the Persians, Julian first inquired about their religious affiliation. When he found out that the city was mostly Christian, he allowed the Persians to raid it at will.

So John helped Christians to stay out of the way of the army, and thus to stay out of trouble. But this meant taking sides. Soon someone figured out that John was in contact with the Christians, and he was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. He would sit in prison until the sentence could be carried out.

There was a holdup with the execution, however. Perhaps the delay was connected to Emperor Julian’s next project. Julian knew that if he was going to make his neo-pagan reforms stick, he would have to do something so grand it would convince Rome that paganism really was the right way to go. And there was one gesture so grand that no Roman had ever accomplished it. Julian would conquer Persia, the lands south of Scythia around modern Iran.

The last man to really defeat the Persians was Alexander the Great. Julius Caesar had wanted to conquer Persia, but had been assassinated before he could even set out. Since then, many other Romans had tried, but all had failed. One emperor, Valerian, had been captured alive by the Persians, and it was said that the Persian king had made the man his living footstool, standing on the fallen emperor’s back to mount his horse.

As Julian marched out, everyone understood that a victory would empower the pagan faction in Rome. Saint Basil prayed that God would stop the emperor, asking for the intercession of Mary and a warrior saint: Saint Mercurius.

Meanwhile John sat in prison.

Now even if at this point John was not a Christian, many of those locked up with him would have been. Perhaps, as he began to speak to some of the people he had helped, he found himself being drawn into what they believed. John had started to help because that was what he did. Now John’s own faith began to grow. Christians spoke of the martyrs of the past, the great athletes of God. Perhaps soon John was hoping for a martyrdom of his own.

At first, things went well for the Emperor Julian in Persia. Julian smashed through the Persian defenses and marched into the country. He split his army in two, with both pieces closing like a pincer on the Persian capital of Ctesiphon. But when Julian’s part of the pincer arrived, he learned that the rest of the army had been delayed. Deep in Persian territory, without enough men to conduct a siege, Julian began a withdrawal to a more strategic location where he could put his army back together. And that was when something very strange happened.

During a minor skirmish, someone threw a spear that struck the apostate emperor in the stomach. Julian was taken to his tent, dying and - as both pagans and Christians agreed - focused on someone or something that only he could see. No one could figure out who had thrown the spear, although Saint Basil noticed a curious change in his icon: the tip of Saint Mercurius’ spear was now red.

With Julian gone, the direction of Roman policy changed again. The new emperor would be a Christian. People in prison for helping the Christians - people like John - were no longer in trouble. John didn’t need to be a martyr after all. He was let go.

We don’t know anything about this part of John’s life. But we can guess that John did not remain in the area, because it seems that he soon lost contact with the Christian community. Perhaps he moved, but more likely he returned to the military. John would have gone wherever the legions needed him, passing from Christian community to community without ever putting down roots.

In the West, John is regarded as an almost-martyr, a man who was willing to die for Christianity but didn’t have to. By the time John died, he had had quietly grown into holiness. Perhaps God was the only one who knew.

19th century icon of Saint John the Soldier. John is usually depicted with weaponry, but here he only holds the cross. [O.E. Kler Sverdlovsk Regional Ethnography Museum]

But that was not quite the end of the story. After John’s death, a Christian woman met the saint in a dream. When she woke up, she looked where the saint had told her and found a body. But who was this man? Gradually, the Christian community began to put the story together. People remembered John the Scythian, the soldier who had been kind to them, who had even been willing to die alongside them. They realized who he must have become afterward. People began praying at John’s tomb, and found help and healing. In Christendom, though especially in the East, John came to be remembered as one of the great warrior saints, a man who had saved others and thereby saved himself, who had almost lost his life, but had, instead, found his way to Life everlasting.

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