One of the ways to test the sincerity of someone who has come over to your side is to make that person harm someone who had previously claimed that person’s allegiance. You have decided to defect to our country? Then kill someone important from your former country to demonstrate your commitment!

This is what happened during one of the enforced-religion endeavors by the Persian government under Shapur II (incidentally the longest-reigning Shah in Persian/Iranian history) in the 300s: Shapur II, like Constantine that same century, wanted a religion to unite his dominion. For Shapur, unlike Constantine, that religion did not turn out to be Christianity.

So when things got dangerous for Christians in Shapur’s empire, a significant number of them jumped on the bandwagon of adopting Shapur’s religion. However, these Christians were trusted as much as Muslims in America, post-9/11, suddenly converting to Christianity.

Now, Vartranes had been a Christian priest in Persia who had fled Christianity in the face of persecution. Desiring to make Vartranes “prove” himself as sincerely ex-Christian, he was ordered to execute another Christian who refused to recant his faith, a man named Guhsciatazades.

Butler describes this interaction:

Guhsciatazades, an eunuch in the palace of Ardascirus, refused to sacrifice to the sun; whereupon that prince commanded Vartranes, an apostate priest who had shrunk at his trial and renounced his faith, to kill him with his own hand. The wretch (Vartranes) advanced; but at first sight of the holy martyr trembled, and stopped short, not daring for a considerable time to give a thrust. The martyr said to him: “Do you who are a priest come to kill me? I certainly mistake when I call you a priest. Accomplish your design but remember the apostacy [sic] and end of Judas.” At last the impious Vartranes made a trembling push, and stabbed the holy eunuch.

What became of Vartranes after this is unknown. He seems only remembered as a 4th-century Judas. And with distance, one can recognize the horrible vise in which Vartranes found himself–essentially being told, “Kill or be killed.”

Yes, the state actors bear the greatest culpability for the deaths of those whose worship did not align with what the government wanted, and for threatening death to those who would not submit to their efforts to enforce conformity. Nevertheless, whether it was ancient Palestine or Persia, or whether it was Nazi Germany or present-day America, the oppressive vileness of governmental forces does not thereby excuse each and every individual from a duty to do the right-est thing toward fellow humans, creatures, and creation–even if the cost is an ultimate one.

As Hannah Arendt so masterfully demonstrates in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, systemic evil cannot take root without the cooperation of person upon person upon person upon person–regular, average, sociable folk–who unquestioningly consent to do the jobs they are given, who go along to get along, and who choose not to ask why, let alone refuse to cooperate with actions that they know to be wrong.