Didymus of Laodicea

Holy Martyr Didymus of Laodicea suffered in Syria, together with Saint Diodorus, at a time not known with precision. They are commemorated on 24 September.

The Byzantine synaxaria preserve accounts of these zealous Christians, who preached the Gospel to the pagans and brought many to Christ and baptised them. The ruler of Laodicea ordered them seized. At the trial they firmly confessed Christ and would not renounce their faith, but rebuked the worship of idols and accused the ruler of lawlessness. After tortures the martyrs died. In some synaxaria, among them the Synaxarion of the Church of Constantinople from the end of the tenth century, it is said that they were beaten to death. A similar account is found in the Menologion of Basil II (end of the tenth century) under 11 September, whence it passed into the Slavonic-⁠Russian Prologues.

On the basis of Byzantine sources Cardinal Caesar Baronius placed under the same date, in the Roman Martyrology, information on these martyrs and added to them, from the Greek Menaia of his time, a martyr Diomedes, who is not mentioned in the earlier Byzantine synaxaria. In the oldest calendars, from the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries, in the Syriac Martyrology and in the Martyrology of Blessed Jerome, the name of Diodorus is mentioned without companions, under 9 October. On the basis of the synaxaria, which say that Diodorus baptised many converted pagans, the Syriac Martyrology presents him as a priest.