Saint St. Theodore

Theodorus (Greek: Θεοδώρος; ca. 775 – ca. 842) and Theophanes (Greek: Θεοφάνης; ca. 778 – 845), called the Grapti (from Greek: γραπτοί, "written upon"), are remembered as proponents of the veneration of icons during the second Iconoclastic controversy. They were brothers and natives of Jerusalem. Theophanes Vita prima was recorded in the Life of Michael the Synkellos. Theophanes and his brother Theodore were born in Palestine near the end of the eighth century, sons of the Venerable Jonah the Presbyter. Both grew up in Jerusalem, entered the Monastery of Mar Sabba near Bethlehem together, and became disciples of Michael the Synkellos (later syncellus of the Patriarch of Jerusalem). In 813 Michael and his two disciples left Jerusalem originally on a journey to Rome. They had been sent by the Patriarch of Jerusalem to support the Pope in his stand against the Franks over the question of the filioque, which some Benedictines from the West had recently introduced to Jerusalem. In the course of their journey, in about 812, they landed in Constantinople, entered a monastery, and where in opposition to the Emperor Leo V (813–20) they energetically defended the veneration of images. However, the Seventh Ecumenical Council had condemned Iconoclasm as a heresy, so they were detained, interrogated, beaten and imprisoned by order of the Emperor Leo V (the Armenian) in 815. During the whole of the second iconoclast period—nearly thirty years—they suffered at various times exile, imprisonment and torture. Under the succeeding emperor, Michael II (820–29), they were brought into the monastery of Sosthenes on the Bosphorus. Michael's successor, the tyrannical and Iconoclastic Theophilos (829–42), exiled them again, but recalled them in 836 to the capital, had them imprisoned in the Praetorium of Constantinople and scourged several times, and had twelve lines of verse cut or tattooed into their skin (hence the nickname "written upon").