Welcome to Variety Podcast. I'm your host, Belizeha Mason Heimer, and I am here to teach you how to know what you believe, to live it boldly, and to communicate it graciously to the world around you.

I believe that women are ready to go deeper in their faith than ever before, and they don't have to go to seminary to do it.

I am so glad you're here, and I hope you'll join me on this journey because every woman is a theologian.

Hello friends, and welcome back to Variety Podcast. We are in the middle of our early church section of this church history series, and today we are going to be talking about key figures of the early church.

I'm so excited for how this series has turned out because the way that it's been structured, which was experimental, by the way, it's kind of adding layers to your understanding of what was going on in this church period.

So if you've listened to the previous episodes, we talked about the world of the early church, what was going on culturally at the time of its spread, and then we talked about the creeds and the councils, and now we're talking about these key figures, these people who played a role in the early church.

And so by this point, you will probably recognize some of these names, some of what they did and what they were involved in, and I have for you five or six male figures of the early church and then five female figures of the early church.

Now, when it comes to records, we have a lot more about the male figures because they were predominantly in the apostle bishop, overseer type of roles, and the women, just as essential, were often in the role of financial support hosting the churches, acting sometimes in a disciple role as the leader of a convent.

So they were not overseeing the churches in the way that many of the bishops would have been at this point, but they still served a very important role as you will see throughout this series.

And it's going to change over the course of history as it does in different cultural areas, but it's still interesting to see what they did and, as we'll see in this episode in particular, what the church fathers said about them.

What they said about the church mothers. Okay, so let's start with the men.

We're going to start with Polly Carp. So Polly Carp was a personal disciple of the Apostle John as an old man, he was a bishop of the church at Smirna in Asia Minor, which is present day Turkey. So this was around the year 120 to 140 AD. He was martyred in the year 155 AD.

Church fathers are NAS and Jerome both mentioned him and wrote about him and what Polly Carp is most famous for aside from his faithful life and being discipled by the Apostle John is how he behaved during his martyrdom.

And so there are records of what Polly Carp said and how he behaved when he was brought before the Roman consul. And so I'm going to read to you one of these transcripts of what happened.

So Polly Carp was brought to the arena. He had been brought in because of the persecutions against the Christians in approximately 150 AD. We talked about this in our first episode of this series. We talked about the persecutions that would happen under the different Roman emperors. This was one of them.

And the proconsul asked him to curse Christ and be released. Basically told him I don't want to kill you, but if you curse Christ and you say he's not the Lord, then I will release you.

Polly Carp said, 86 years I have served him. He had never done me wrong. How then can I blaspheme my king who has saved me?

The proconsul reached for an acceptable way out. Then do this old man just swear by the genius of the emperor and that will be sufficient.

So the word for a genius here that he's using is the spirit of the emperor. And this would be basically like sacrificing to a pagan god or saying that the emperor was equivalent to God.

So he's basically swearing by the spirit of the emperor. Polly Carp said, if you imagine for a moment that I would do that, then I think you pretend that you don't know who I am here. It plainly, I am a Christian.

And so the proconsul threatened him with the wild beasts to throw him in the arena with them. And he replied, bring them forth. I would change my mind if it meant going from the worst to the better, but not change from the right to the wrong.

The proconsul's patience was gone. I will have you burned alive, he said.

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