The Holy Fathers Slain at Sinai and Raithu
The ascetic fathers of Mount Sinai and of Raithu on the Red Sea, cut down by raiders while at prayer in their cells — two massacres, remembered by the Church on one day with the survivors who wrote down what they saw.
Twice the hermits of the Sinai peninsula were cut down by raiders out of the desert, and the Church keeps both massacres on one day. The fathers of Mount Sinai lived scattered in cells around the mountain of the Law-giving, gathering on Saturdays and Sundays for the services; the fathers of Raithu kept a similar life by the Red Sea, some days' journey to the south. In each place the raiders came upon men who were unarmed by choice, and killed them in their cells and about their church.
What is known of the two attacks comes from men who lived through them. Ammonius, an Egyptian monk who had come on pilgrimage, wrote down what he saw at Sinai and what he was told of Raithu; his account is the source from which the synaxarion draws. The Church numbers the fathers not by the manner of their death alone but by the life it interrupted — a life of stillness kept in a place with nothing in it to keep a man but God.
Commemorated with them are Joseph Analytinus of Raithu and Theodulus of Sinai, the son of Saint Nilus, who was carried off by raiders in the same years and afterwards restored to his father. Their own days are kept on January 14 with the rest.