The fire-temple and the persecution
The immediate occasion of the martyrdom, as the sources relate it, was the demolition of a Zoroastrian fire-temple in which Abdas was involved. To the Persian authorities the fire was an object of religious veneration, and the destruction of its shrine was treated as an offense against the kingdom itself. When summoned, the bishop refused to rebuild what he held to be no house of God. The historians frame the dispute as one of conscience: Abdas would not raise again a temple to the fire even to save himself or to spare the churches.
His execution was, by the sources' account, the first of many. Yazdegerd's order to destroy the Christian churches and to persecute and torture the faithful turned a single confrontation into a sustained campaign. The persecution is associated in later commemorations with a number of companions and fellow-sufferers; the names handed down vary across the calendars, and the synaxarion that underlies the September 5 commemoration joins to Abdas the martyrs Hormizd and Sunin.