Zosimus the Hermit

Venerable Zosimas the Hermit was an ascetic who dwelt in the wilds of Cilicia and Palestine, in the third century or the beginning of the next. He is commemorated together with his disciple, Athanasius Commentariensis, on 4 January by the old calendar (17 January by the new) in the Orthodox Church and in the Greek Catholic Church; the Catholic Church commemorates them a day earlier, on 3 January. Part of his story is legend.

He was tortured in the persecution of Diocletian but stood firm in the Christian faith. The Serbian source says that, seized by a Roman prince named Domitian, he confessed that Jesus Christ is the true God and was tortured for this. According to Christian tradition, the tormentors pierced his ears with red-⁠hot iron, threw him into a cauldron of boiling mud and then hung him head down, but Zosimas remained miraculously unharmed. It is said that then a lion came, which spoke with a human voice of the divinity of Christ. These events brought to Christianity Athanasius Commentariensis, the chief of the prison guards, so that the tormentors released Zosimas. Athanasius also confessed the faith, received baptism, and then both were released. Zosimas returned to the desert, with Athanasius, where they lived together; there, according to another source, Athanasius was first instructed in the faith, then baptized. It is said that a rock split in an unusual way, that Zosimas and Athanasius entered the rock and so departed to the Lord.

Legendary accounts say that Zosimas travelled by camel, then borne by the wind, to a place called the "Abode of the Blessed", a paradisiacal realm or a mountain hermitage far from men. As he arrived, he saw a wall of clouds over which two trees lifted him. There he found a company of Rechabites and lived forty years, abstaining from wine, bread and meeting people. Then he left to share the teaching of the Rechabites. To stop him, the devil and many demons tormented him for forty days, but Zosimas drove them out. In his life he is said to have met a penitent at the Jordan. It is commonly held that much of this story is fiction; it seems to be mixed with another apocryphal work, the History of the Rechabites.