Diodorus of Laodicea

Holy Martyr Diodorus of Laodicea suffered in Syria, together with Saint Didymus, 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, brought many to Christ and baptised them. The ruler of Laodicea ordered them seized. At the trial they firmly confessed Christ, would not renounce their faith, and rebuked the worship of idols and the lawlessness of the ruler. After tortures the martyrs died; some synaxaria, among them that of the Church of Constantinople from the end of the tenth century, say that they were beaten to death. A similar account is found in the Menologion of Basil II, under 11 September, whence it passed into the Slavonic-⁠Russian Prologues. On the basis of the 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, unknown to the earlier Byzantine synaxaria.

In the oldest calendars, from the turn of the fourth and fifth centuries, in the Syriac Martyrology and in that of Blessed Jerome, the name of Diodorus appears without companions, under 9 October. On the basis of the synaxaria, which say that Diodorus baptised many of the converted pagans, the Syriac Martyrology presents him as a priest.