St. Sebastian
A Roman martyr commemorated in a list compiled in 354 and buried on the Via Appia; the soldier, the archers and the arrows come from Acts the sources reject.
Canonized
St. Sebastian (Catholic Encyclopedia)
- Roman Martyrology, 20 January.
- Catholic Encyclopedia (1907-1913), Klemens Löffler, 'St. Sebastian'. The source for his feast on 20 January, for the burial on the Via Appia, and for the judgment that the surviving Acts of his life are 'unhistorical and not worthy of belief'. https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13668a.htm
- He was a real martyr, and almost everything people know about him is legend. The article says so plainly: 'little more than the fact of his martyrdom can be proved about St. Sebastian.' What it will vouch for is that he was buried on the Via Appia, which a list drawn up in 354 records, and that Ambrose says he came from Milan and was already honored there in Ambrose's own day. The famous story — the officer in the emperor's guard, the kindnesses done secretly to fellow Christians, the archers, the arrows, the widow who nursed him, the clubbing — comes from Acts written around the start of the fifth century. The article's verdict on all of it is one sentence: 'These stories are unhistorical and not worthy of belief.'
- The arrows are the newest part of the legend. The oldest known picture of him, a mosaic of about 682, shows a grown bearded man in court dress with no arrow anywhere in it. The article says it was Renaissance art that first portrayed him as a youth pierced by arrows.
- No year of his death is recorded here, because the one document held for him does not give one and names no emperor either. The only year in it is 286, and that is the year the rejected Acts give for his being found out as a Christian, not for his death. He is often said to have died under Diocletian; the article was searched for 'Diocletian' in August 2026 and the name does not occur in it.
- He is invoked for three things and the article supports only one. It says plainly that 'Sebastian is considered a protector against the plague', and gives the answers to prayer that built that tradition: Rome in 680, Milan in 1575, Lisbon in 1599. It never calls him patron of soldiers and never mentions athletes — searched for both words in August 2026, and neither occurs. The soldiering that the soldiers tradition rests on is in the article, but only inside the Acts it rejects. No formal act naming him patron of anything has been found.