Lives and Martyrdoms of the Saints, Volume 1

In the mixed multitude of spectators, there were also notaries official clerks appointed by the Church, whose task it was to record with faithful caution what they heard and saw: the words and allurements of the judges, the responses of the saints to them, and the various kinds of tortures and the death of martyrdom. These things were read into the ears of the believers and then gathered into the archives of the Church. This was the beginning of the books called Martyrologies records of martyrs or Martyrdoms accounts of witnesses, which the churches of the East and West preserved with reverent caution and brought down to us.

And since the Church of Armenia also shone with the same order of piety, in which land many were dedicated through a martyr's death to the heavens, it is evident that it reached us to read even the beautiful martyrdom of the holy apostle Thaddeus and his fellow witness, the king's daughter Sandukht, recorded—as it seems probable—by their contemporaries. Then, it became common for other nations to pour their accounts into ours, especially from Greek and Syriac, and to have them offered for the enjoyment of the pious who love the saints. Here, we have carefully selected these from the Charentrak Lectionary/Collection of Discourses books, or caused them to be published in print. We hope that these glorious memorials will be received as pleasing, serving as reminders of the victories of faith and as reproaches to these sad times of ours, in which faith diminishes day by day and the instructions of piety weaken and fade.