Demetrius Lebedev

Saint Demetrius Lebedev (1871-1937), hieromartyr, was an archpriest, theologian, historian of the early Church and professor at the Moscow Theological Academy, a specialist in the calendar and paschalia. He was shot at the Butovo firing range on 27 November 1937. He was numbered among the New Martyrs and Confessors of Russia by the Council of Bishops in August 2000. He is commemorated on 14 November by the old calendar, in the synaxis of the New Martyrs and in the synaxis of the New Martyrs of Butovo.

Life

He was born in 1871 in the village of Spirovo in the Volokolamsk district of Moscow province, in the family of the priest Alexander Ivanovich Lebedev of the church of the Entrance into the Temple. He studied at the church school in Volokolamsk, the Bethany seminary (1892) and the Moscow Theological Academy (1894-1898). From 1898 he taught at the church school in Edinets, in Bessarabia, and from 1903 Russian at the church school in Ufa. In February 1904 he received the degree of candidate of theology for a study of the structural elements of the Christian paschalia.

On 4 February 1905 he was ordained priest and served at the Saint Nicholas Cathedral in Mozhaisk, from 1908 as rector and chairman of the Mozhaisk section of the diocesan school council, and from 1911 as dean. From 1909 he taught religion at the rural school in Chentsovo. In 1915 he defended his master's dissertation, From the History of Ancient Paschal Rites, with research on the nineteen-⁠year cycle of Anatolius of Laodicea, and was appointed docent in the chair of ancient church history at the Moscow Academy. In January 1916 he left priestly service and in the same year was confirmed extraordinary professor, succeeding Professor A. A. Spassky. In 1919 he presented as doctoral dissertation the work The List of the 318 Bishops of the First Ecumenical Council. He taught at the Academy moved from the Sergiev Posad Lavra to Moscow.

Persecution and martyrdom

He then served in his native village of Spirovo, where he suffered pressure: on 30 August 1930 he was sentenced to a fine of 150 roubles for "walking with icons", in 1932 he was evicted for non-⁠payment of taxes and all his property confiscated, and in 1933 he was convicted of "anti-⁠Soviet agitation" and sentenced to three years of exile in Kazakhstan. After exile he resumed service at the church of the Entrance into the Temple in Spirovo and was raised to archpriest. On 11 November 1937 he was arrested, accused of preaching sermons in church, of close ties with the clergy of Teryaevo and of going to the houses of collective farmers, where he held talks. On 23 November the NKVD troika sentenced him to death in a group case, with Archpriest Nikolai Vinogradov, Deacon Pyotr Smirnov and Gavriil Bezfamilny, and on 27 November he was shot at Butovo.

He wrote about thirty works on the history of the early Church of the third and fourth centuries, on the church calendar and paschalia, among them The Council of Antioch of 324, Eusebius of Nicomedia and Lucian, On the Pascha of 22 March and a memoir of Professor Vasily Bolotov. He firmly opposed the introduction of the Gregorian calendar, giving unconditional preference to the old Julian style.