Religion & Spirituality
St. Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna was born in the second half of the first century and martyred sometime in the middle of the second century. Eusebius, in his Church History, wrote of him, "At that time [the reign of emperor Trajan] Polycarp, a disciple of the apostles, was a man of eminence in Asia, having been entrusted with the episcopate of the church of Smyrna by those who had seen and heard the Lord" (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd Series, Vol. 1, p.166, bracket added). "His pupil Irenaeus gives us one of the very few portraits of an apostolic man which are to be found in antiquity, in a few sentences which are a picture: 'I could describe the very place in which the blessed Polycarp sat and taught; his going out and coming in; the whole tenor of his life; his personal appearance; how he would speak of the conversations he had held with John and with others who had seen the Lord. How did he make mention of their words and of whatever he had heard from them respecting the Lord.' " (Anti-Nicene Fathers, Vol 1. P. 31).