A Refutation of New Evidence for the Pre-Nicene Invocation of the Saints

The article proves that some early Christians believed the saints in heaven pray for us. It does not prove that Christians prayed to the saints. Those are two different claims, and the case depends on treating them as one.

Its earliest evidence, dated to 160, is a single sentence in a novel whose author was removed from office for writing it. The 2026 study it relies on places that sentence after prayer ends, not inside prayer.

Intercession is not invocation

Everything turns on a distinction the article states and then lets collapse.

• Intercession means the saints in heaven pray for us.

• Invocation means we pray to them and ask them for things.

Many Protestants grant the first and deny the second. Proving that the saints pray does not prove that anyone asked them to. A doctor may treat you without being called.

The article admits that its seven main sources do not "directly refer to their invocation." It then presents them as the foundation "without which it would be impossible" to invoke the saints. That is true and beside the point. A necessary condition is not evidence that the practice existed.

Section 1 proves a point nobody disputes

The seven "intercession" sources are weaker than presented, and several cut against the article.

Source by source

Ignatius, Trallians 13:3. The line is: "Let my spirit be sanctified by yours, not only now, but also when I shall attain to God." Read it in the direction it actually runs. Ignatius is the one being sanctified by the Trallians; he is asking the living for something, not offering to answer them after his death. The scholars the article quotes concede the ambiguity — "it is not clear in what sense," "perhaps" — and Kirk reduces the whole line to "I am yours in life and death." The article also calls the recipients Smyrnaean and the community Johannine. The letter was written to Tralles.

Clement of Alexandria. The article quotes Stromata 7.12: "He also prays in the society of angels, as being already of angelic rank … and though he pray alone, he has the choir of the saints standing with him." But the choir stands with the one praying. It is company, not an audience — nobody addresses it, and nothing is asked of it. Five chapters earlier Clement has already defined the act: "Prayer is, then, to speak more boldly, converse with God" (Stromata 7.7). Converse with God, in the company of the saints. Not converse with the saints.

Origen. The article's own quotation has the heavenly powers helping us "even though they are not invoked." That concession is the whole argument. Origen is answering Celsus, who wanted Christians to court lesser powers: you need not call on them, because they already assist anyone who prays to God. A few chapters on he says it without hedging — "Celsus forgets that he is addressing Christians, who pray to God alone through Jesus" (Against Celsus 8.37). The passage is evidence against invocation, not for it.

Origen on the teachers before him. Homily 16 on Joshua reports an unnamed "ancient teacher" reading Numbers 22:4 as the departed destroying our adversaries "through its prayers and supplications." Intercession again: they pray, and nobody asks them to. It also survives only in Rufinus' Latin, a translator known to smooth Origen toward later orthodoxy. An anonymous allegory on a verse about an ox eating grass is not a doctrine, still less a practice.

Cyprian. He writes to Cornelius that whichever of them dies first should go on praying for the other, and he asks living virgins to "remember us." Both are arrangements made in advance, with the living — which is exactly what you would do if nobody prayed to the dead. The gloss "[of life and death]" is the article's addition. The Latin utrobique more naturally means "in both places": Rome and Carthage.

The Sibylline Oracles

This is the article's earliest claimed witness to Marian intercession, and it will not bear the weight.

Start with what the text is. The Sibyllines are Christian compositions written in the voice of a pagan prophetess — forgeries in the technical sense, built to make Christian doctrine look like ancient gentile prophecy. Whatever they reveal about popular imagination, they are not a record of what the church taught.

Then read the quoted line in its setting. The damned are in Gehenna. They "call death beautiful, and death shall flee away from them," and "many things in vain will they ask of the God that rules on high, and then will he his face turn openly away from them." The article's line follows immediately: "For he to erring men gave, in seven ages for repentance, signs by the hands of a virgin undefiled" (Terry's translation, lines 381–383 = 2.311–313).

That is a statement about a chance already given and now closed. It is not a prayer. Nobody addresses the virgin, and nobody asks her for anything. The sentence is past and completed, and its function is to explain why God turns his face away — the opportunity was already provided.

The text also never names Mary. It says only "a holy virgin," "a virgin undefiled." Lightfoot's identification with Mary is reasonable, and I am not disputing it. But an unnamed figure in a pseudepigraphic oracle is thin ground for the claim that invoking the Virgin was already common in second-century Palestine.

Now look twenty lines further on. The pious will "ask the imperishable God" to save the damned "from raging fire and endless gnawing anguish," and "this will he do." That is universal restoration. Ancient scribes noticed: several manuscripts append a formal Contradiction, which reads in part, "False manifestly; for the penal fire shall never cease from those who are condemned … But let Origen of his presumptuous babble be ashamed, saying there shall be end of punishments."

The scribal note attacks the universalism, not the virgin line, and I will not pretend otherwise. But the point stands. The one passage in this neighbourhood that actually describes intercession has the blessed interceding to empty hell, and Christian copyists attached a refutation branding it Origenist error. The article presents Sibylline Oracles 2 as a safely proto-orthodox witness whose contents raise no concerns. Its own ancient readers disagreed.

Two Latin outliers

Pseudo-Cyprian and De Aleatoribus are used to extend the picture westward, and neither adds anything the article needs. De Laude Martyrii asks living confessors to remember the writer once they are martyred — the same forward-looking arrangement with the living that Cyprian makes. De Aleatoribus is cited for the belief that the saints are aware of us; its date and authorship are genuinely unsettled, having been assigned to Victor I, Callistus and Melchiades across a span from the late second century to the early fourth. I have not consulted chapter 11 directly, and the argument does not turn on it: the article invokes the tract for awareness and intercession, not for invocation, so it falls under the same answer as the rest of this section.

The intermediate state. Several of these writers did not think ordinary saints were in heaven yet. Irenaeus has the souls of the disciples "go away into the invisible place allotted to them by God, and there remain until the resurrection" (Against Heresies 5.31). Tertullian is blunter: "To no one is heaven opened," and Paradise "displays no other souls as in it besides the souls of the martyrs" (On the Soul 55). He goes on to argue that apparitions of the dead are demons operating "under cover of these souls" (On the Soul 57). That is a poor foundation for a church praying to departed saints.

The 160 AD claim rests on a novel

Problems with the source itself

The book was condemned and its author punished. Tertullian, writing around 200, says that "in Asia, the presbyter who composed that writing, as if he were augmenting Paul's fame from his own store, after being convicted, and confessing that he had done it from love of Paul, was removed from his office" (On Baptism 17). Eusebius places the Acts of Paul among the rejected writings, not merely the disputed ones (Church History 3.25). Jerome reckons "the Acts of Paul and Thecla and all the fable about the lion baptized by him" among the apocrypha, and repeats that the presbyter was convicted and resigned his office (On Illustrious Men 7). The Gelasian Decree rejects it. Egeria did hear it read at Thecla's shrine, so it was popular — but popular is not authoritative, and the article's claim that it "always enjoyed high prestige" does not survive these notices.

The article cites the wrong work. Its heading reads "Acts of Paul and Thecla (160 AD)" and it cites "Acts of Paul and Thecla 5:3." The passage is from the Martyrdom of Paul, a separate unit which Antoniades says "most likely originally circulated independent of any other works." Thecla's story has nothing to do with Paul's beheading.

The date is a range, not a point. Antoniades dates the work to "the latter half of the second century." That is 150 to 200. The article reports the earliest edge as if it were settled.

What the 2026 study actually argues

The study is real and peer-reviewed: Vasili Antoniades, "A Note on the Martyrdom of Paul 5:3", Vigiliae Christianae 80.4 (2026): 391–397, published online 13 July 2026.

It is a seven-page technical note on one sentence. Otto Zwierlein's critical edition prefers the Ohrid manuscript, where Paul simply addresses the people around him. Antoniades argues the Hamburg papyrus and Patmos manuscript are right instead.

His argument is that "fathers" is the harder reading. Three later scribes each found it confusing and each removed it differently. That is good evidence the word was original, and on the textual question he is probably right. Concede it.

Why it does not carry the conclusion

1. His reconstruction puts the conversation after prayer, not inside it. This is decisive. The article quotes the Patmos reading κατὰ προσευχήν, "during the prayer," because only that makes the conversation itself prayer. Antoniades' proposed text reads καταπαύσας προσευχὴν, "having ended the prayer." His own abstract says Paul communes with the fathers "after prayer." Paul finishes praying to God, and then speaks.

2. Dix, who first noticed the verse, refused to use it this way. Antoniades opens by noting that Dix "does not use the passage as evidence for an early cult of saints." Antoniades never makes that argument either. The leap to invocation belongs to the article, not to the scholarship it cites.

3. He calls the identification a probable guess, twice. On the fathers being the patriarchs: "it is not explicitly stated." On the Dix–Snyder reading of the scene as a Jewish cult of the dead: "Although a probable suggestion, it is not explicit." A Jewish custom of addressing the dead is not the Christian doctrine of invoking saints.

4. The manuscript evidence is fourth century. The oldest witness, H, is dated about 300. Antoniades concedes H is "highly interpolated" — including Paul's long prayer to God, which he deletes. He says H shows the reading "can be traced back as early as the fourth century." The second century is an inference from that, not an artifact.

5. Paul asks for nothing. There is no petition and no request for intercession. A dying man at the threshold of heaven seeing those he is about to join resembles Stephen's vision in Acts 7. It is not a pattern for the living asking the dead for help.

The jump to the first century has no support. The article moves from a second-century novel to the claim that Paul himself invoked the saints. Sean McDowell, quoted for this, argues only that the bare fact of Paul's martyrdom is historical. He does not defend the details of a fictional death scene.

So the strongest honest version of the claim is this. A novel written between 150 and 200, by an author removed from office for writing it, contains one sentence in which a dying apostle speaks to the patriarchs after he finishes praying, in a phrase scholars associate with a Jewish practice. That is a long way from dating the invocation of the saints to 160.

The catacomb graffiti: real evidence, limited conclusion

Concede this one plainly. The inscriptions in the triclia at San Sebastiano do ask Peter and Paul to intercede, and at least one is earlier than August 260. Anyone who says the cult of the saints began only in the fourth century is refuted by that wall.

It still does not reach the apostles

They are late. They come roughly two centuries after the apostles. Wiśniewski, whom the article quotes, says the practice began "probably not earlier than the middle of the third century."

They are popular, not official. They are scratches left by visitors. They are not a liturgy, a council, or a bishop's teaching. No pre-Nicene church order prescribes anything like them.

They belong to a Roman custom for the dead. The graffiti are tied to the refrigerium, a graveside meal taken over from Roman family practice. Monica brought "cakes, and bread, and wine" to the memorials of the saints in Africa until Ambrose forbade it (Confessions 6.2). Augustine spent years suppressing the same custom at Hippo, where the crowds called it Laetitia and "were becoming openly violent" when it was banned (Letters 22.3–6; 29.2).

Augustine also says where it came from. Converts "having been accustomed to celebrate the feasts connected with their worship of idols in revelling and drunkenness … could not easily refrain," so the church's ancestors permitted them "to celebrate, instead of the festivals which they renounced, other feasts in honour of the holy martyrs" (Letter 29.9). That is a bishop stating plainly that martyr-feasts were a managed substitute for pagan festivals. It does not by itself decide what the graffiti mean. It does establish the devotional setting in which they were scratched.

The same requests were made to ordinary relatives. Kirsch, quoted approvingly by the article, admits Christians scratched the same "pray for us" to their own dead kin. That points to a practice growing out of Roman funerary custom rather than descending from apostolic teaching.

Two further claims about the graffiti

The orthodoxy argument answers a question nobody asked. Whether these were proto-orthodox Christians is not in dispute. The question is whether the practice came from the apostles. Orthodox Christians can adopt an innovation.

The relic transfer is a hypothesis. The article's own source says Duchesne's theory "is not substantiated in an explicit manner by any single source." It is then used to explain why the cult arose at that spot.

The remaining pre-Nicene items

Hippolytus is using a figure of speech. A few lines earlier in the same passage he writes, "Tell me, Nebuchadnezzar." Nobody thinks he was praying to Nebuchadnezzar. The article concedes the chapter consists "primarily of rhetorical statements," then exempts one clause from that judgment. Dix, quoted in support, admits scholars have treated it as rhetorical. Matching two words to later graffiti does not turn an apostrophe into a prayer.

Origen's "Come, angel" is a homiletic flourish. The line is: "Come, angel. Receive him who has been converted from his former error and the doctrines of demons … Receive him as a careful physician; warm and heal him … Receive him and give him the baptism of second birth" (Homilies on Ezekiel 1.7). It is an address to an angel standing at a font, spoken during the rite, not a petition sent to heaven — and it survives only in Latin, in Jerome's translation. Set it against what Origen says when he is arguing rather than preaching.

• Against Celsus 5.4: "Every prayer, and supplication, and intercession, and thanksgiving, is to be sent up to the Supreme God through the High Priest, who is above all the angels, the living Word and God."

• Against Celsus 5.5: "to invoke angels without having obtained a knowledge of their nature greater than is possessed by men, would be contrary to reason" — and such knowledge "will not permit us to pray with confidence to any other than to the Supreme God."

• Against Celsus 8.26: "our duty is to pray to the Most High God alone."

On Prayer 14 is the passage cited against this, and it repays reading in full. Origen is listing what may be offered "even to men." He allows "request to saints alone, should some Paul or Peter appear," then immediately adds that if we have wronged someone who is not a saint, we may make request of him too, "that he extend pardon to us who have wronged him." The parallel case is plainly a living person. And whatever Origen concedes about request, he reserves prayer in the strict sense for God alone — which the article itself concedes, calling it a peculiarity of his.

The martyrs of Sigus do not pray to angels. They pray that they may have God, Christ, and the angels as helpers. That is a request addressed to God for angelic aid, not a request addressed to angels — the grammar decides it, and the article itself can only say the words "seem to suggest" otherwise.

The Rylands papyrus cannot carry a pre-Nicene claim. What it says is not in doubt. Roberts' translation reads: "Mother of God (hear) my supplications: suffer us not (to be) in adversity, but deliver us from danger." That is invocation, plainly, and it calls Mary Theotokos. The question is when it was written — and its dating has never been settled, the early end resting on one brief remark.

Dating record compiled from Roger Pearse's review of the scholarship.

Only Lobel placed it in the third century, and only in passing. The first editor dated it a century later. The article's own expert prefers the fourth century and says it could be later still. Shoemaker's defence is circular: he reasons that Marian devotion might be early, so the papyrus might be early — and the article then uses the papyrus to show Marian devotion was early.

A double standard with the witnesses against

Every source favourable to invocation is read generously. Every source against it is explained away, usually by attacking the author.

Irenaeus. Grant that the beings invoked by the Carpocratians were demonic paredroi. His positive statement still stands: the church does nothing "by means of angelic invocations" and directs "her prayers to the Lord, who made all things" (Against Heresies 2.32.5). That sentence describes the church's own prayer, not heretical magic.

Origen and Lactantius. They are dismissed as "never a Church Father in the strict sense" and "more of a rhetorician than a theologian." Yet Origen is the single most quoted witness in the article wherever he helps its case. The reasoning is selective: a weak theologian can still report accurately what Christians around him did.

Both told pagan critics that Christians pray to God alone. If congregations everywhere were petitioning martyrs, that defence would have been plainly false, and the critics would have said so. Celsus pressed exactly this question about honouring lesser powers. Origen never answers, "we do ask our martyrs."

Tertullian. The article is right that Apology 47 is a weak Protestant proof-text; it says only that the world does not know paradise. The stronger passages are On the Soul 55–57, which the article does not address. In 55 he states the rule — "every soul is detained in safe keeping in Hades until the day of the Lord," and "the sole key to unlock Paradise is your own life's blood," meaning only martyrs skip the wait. In 57 he denies the holy dead can be reached at all: "God forbid … that we should suppose that the soul of any saint, much less of a prophet, can be dragged out of [its resting-place in Hades] by a demon." A writer who holds that ordinary Christians sleep in Hades until the resurrection, and that apparitions of the saints are demonic counterfeits, is not a witness for asking them for favours.

Laodicea, canon 35. The canon reads: "Christians must not forsake the Church of God, and go away and invoke angels … If, therefore, any one shall be found engaged in this covert idolatry, let him be anathema." Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, explains it directly in his commentary on Colossians 2:18: "this vice lasted for a long time in Phrygia and Pisidia. Therefore it was that the synod which met at Laodicea in Phrygia, prohibited by a canon, that prayer should be offered to angels, and even to-day an oratory of St. Michael can be seen among them." The Greek leaves no room: σύνοδος ἐν Λαοδικείᾳ τῆς Φρυγίας νόμῳ κεκώλυκε τὸ τοῖς ἀγγέλοις προσεύχεσθαι — the synod "forbade by law praying to angels" (PG 82; the column is cited variously as 613 and 620).

Be fair about the difficulty. Some Latin witnesses read angulos, corners, rather than angelos, angels. And Henry Percival — the same scholar the article quotes approvingly on fourth-century unanimity — argued in his edition of the canons that this one cannot be read as condemning the church's cultus of angels. That deserves an answer rather than silence.

But notice what Theodoret does to Cline's reading. Cline argues the canon banned only secret, extra-ecclesial invocation, and points to the shrines of Michael as the legitimate public alternative the canon was clearing space for. Theodoret names those very shrines in the same breath — and still reads the canon as forbidding prayer to angels outright. The nearest witness saw both the canon and the shrines, and did not draw Cline's distinction. The article sets that witness aside for a 2011 monograph without saying why.

The silence, and the claim that nobody protested

The early accounts of worship never mention it. The Didache, Justin Martyr's description of the Sunday assembly, and the Apostolic Fathers never direct a prayer to a departed saint. Three full treatises on prayer — by Tertullian, Cyprian, and Origen — teach prayer in detail and never tell Christians to ask a saint for anything. The silence covers two centuries and three regions.

The Martyrdom of Polycarp draws the line explicitly. It was written around 155–160, the same decade the article claims for invocation. "Him indeed, as being the Son of God, we adore; but the martyrs, as disciples and followers of the Lord, we worthily love" (ch. 17). The Christians gather at the grave each year to "celebrate the anniversary of his martyrdom, both in memory of those who have already finished their course, and for the exercising and preparation of those yet to walk in their steps" (ch. 18). Nothing is asked of Polycarp. This is our closest second-century description of martyr devotion, and it does the opposite of what the article needs.

People did protest. Vigilantius objected around 406, and Jerome concedes that "there are bishops who are said to be associated with him in his wickedness" (Against Vigilantius 2). Jerome lists among Vigilantius' complaints "the prayers offered to the dead." Epiphanius, writing against the Collyridians, insisted that "the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit be worshipped, but let no one worship Mary," adding that though Mary is "holy and held in honour, she is not to be worshipped" (Panarion 79).

Augustine did not treat it as settled. At the altar the martyrs "are named … but are not invoked by the priest" (City of God 22.10). In On the Care of the Dead 13–16 he argues that the dead do not normally know what happens on earth, citing Isaiah 63:16, and admits he does not know how the martyrs help.

Fourth-century claims about earlier practice are not evidence for it. Asterius' line that the martyr "too invoked the martyrs" is a preacher's phrase from around 400. Gregory of Nazianzus' story about Justina comes from a sermon that confuses Cyprian of Carthage with a legendary magician.

Section 3 of the article is not in dispute. What Christians did from the fourth century onward is well documented and nobody denies it. It tells us nothing about what the apostles taught. Percival's argument that no innovation could spread unnoticed cuts both ways: the same reasoning would require some trace of the practice in the two centuries where it is missing.

What the evidence actually shows

1. The second century. Christians believed the departed are alive with God, and some believed they pray for the church. No source addresses a prayer to them. Polycarp's community honours its martyr at his grave without asking him for anything.

2. The late third century. Popular devotion appears at martyr graves in Rome, in graffiti and in graveside meals drawn from Roman funerary custom. It is local, lay, and unofficial.

3. The fourth century onward. The practice spreads, bishops adopt it, and it enters preaching and liturgy — over some protest, and with Augustine still unsure how it works.

That is gradual growth from folk custom into official practice. It is not a doctrine handed down from the apostles.

The article's own structure concedes more than it means to. It must first establish that the fathers believed in intercession so that invocation would become possible. A practice actually taught by the apostles would need no such scaffolding. It would simply be attested, early and plainly, in the places where early Christians described how they prayed.

Those places survive, and they say something else. Every prayer in the New Testament is addressed to God, and there is "one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5).

Sources

Pages opened and read for this response:

• Gabriel Klautau, "New Evidence for the Pre-Nicene Invocation of the Saints" — the article under review.

• Vasili Antoniades, "A Note on the Martyrdom of Paul 5:3", Vigiliae Christianae 80.4 (2026): 391–397. Full text read; the manuscript table, the proposed Greek reading, and all quotations come from it.

• Crossref metadata record for that DOI — confirms author, affiliation, pagination, and the 13 July 2026 publication date.

• Roger Pearse, "A review of the scholarship on the paleographical date of P.Ryl. III 470" — source of the dating table.

Primary texts opened and quoted from:

• Ignatius, Epistle to the Trallians 12–13

• Irenaeus, Against Heresies 2.32 and 5.31

• Clement of Alexandria, Stromata Book 7, chapters 7 and 12

• Tertullian, On Baptism 17; A Treatise on the Soul 55 and 57

• Origen, Against Celsus Book 5 and Book 8; On Prayer 14; Homilies on Ezekiel 1.7, in Jerome's Latin

• The Martyrdom of Polycarp 17–18

• P.Ryl. III 470, the Sub tuum praesidium papyrus, John Rylands Library

• Augustine, City of God 22.10; On Care to be Had for the Dead 13–16; Confessions 6.2; Letter 22 and Letter 29

• Jerome, Against Vigilantius 2; On Illustrious Men 7

• Eusebius, Church History 3.25

• Synod of Laodicea, canon 35, with Percival's excursus

• Theodoret, Interpretation of Colossians on 2:18 (PG 82), Greek via the Institute for Colossians Studies

• Sibylline Oracles Book II, M. S. Terry's verse translation, including the manuscript Contradiction appended at lines 404–416