Arethas

Arethas, known in Arabic as al-Ḥārith ibn Kaʿb (also Aretas), was born about the mid-fifth century in the oasis city of Najran, then in southern Arabia and today near the border of Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Najran was a prosperous center of agriculture and trade, home to a large community of Arab Christians who followed the Miaphysite faith, together with a significant Jewish population. Christianity had taken root there by the fifth century—or perhaps earlier—and the city's church, called the Kaʿaba of Najran, drew pilgrims. Arethas succeeded his father as sayyid, or first citizen and lord of Najran, and after the death of Bishop Paul he became the charismatic head of the Christian flock.

Around 518 or 520, Dhu Nuwas, a convert to Judaism, seized the throne of the Himyarite kingdom. He attacked the Aksumite (Ethiopian Christian) garrison at Zafar, burned churches, and then turned on Najran, the Christian stronghold. In the autumn of 523 he laid siege to the city and took it. To terrorize the inhabitants he ordered priests, deacons, nuns, and lay faithful cast into a trench that was set ablaze—the atrocity later remembered in Arabic as al-ukhdūd. Hundreds perished in the flames; tradition numbers some four hundred and twenty-seven in that first slaughter, and overall more than four thousand men, women, and children among the martyrs of Najran.

Brought before the tyrant, Arethas declared that neither he nor his people would apostatize. For this confession he and about a hundred companions were beheaded. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him on 24 October as "prince of the city" together with three hundred and forty companions, martyred in the time of the Emperor Justin under Dunaan (Dhu Nuwas), king of Arabia. Contemporary witnesses recorded the massacre: Dhu Nuwas himself boasted of it in letters to neighboring rulers; Bishop Simeon of Beth Arsham wrote in 524 of women who rushed to join "our fathers, brothers, and sisters who died for Christ our Lord." The events are also alluded to in the Qur'an (sura 85:4–8). The Martyrdom of Arethas survives in early Greek, Arabic, and Geʿez recensions, the oldest Greek form no later than the seventh century, later revised by Symeon Metaphrastes in the tenth.

News of the slaughter reached Emperor Justin I of Byzantium and King Kaleb of Aksum. Survivors carried relics of Arethas to the imperial court and begged for justice. In 525 an Aksumite expedition, allied with Byzantium, overthrew Dhu Nuwas and installed a Christian viceroy. Najran became one of the holy cities of Eastern Christianity until the Islamic conquest; under Caliph Umar the remaining Christians were expelled to Kufa, though a Christian presence lingered into the tenth century. Relics of Saint Arethas are preserved on Mount Athos, in Greek monasteries, and, since 1073, in the Monastery of the Caves at Kiev. In 2023–2024 the Catholic Church marked the fifteen-hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom with a jubilee in the Apostolic Vicariates of the Arabian Peninsula.

May Saint Arethas intercede for all who suffer for the name of Christ, and may we imitate today his unshaken fidelity.