Episode #25 - What is Freedom? Part Five - Modern Martyrs "The 21"

Image used with permission by the artist. 

Mural by Kirollos Kilada in the St. Pope Kyrillos VI Chapel at St. Paul American Coptic Orthodox Church in Irvine, CA. 

Artist’s Website: https://kkilada.com/

Church’s Website: https://www.stpauloc.org/about/chapel

Modern Martyrs

We correct a claim about martyrdom by telling the story of the 21 Coptic workers executed in Libya, a witness captured on video that terrorists meant as propaganda. 

We follow how their calm, their prayer, and their families’ response reshape what we mean by freedom, courage, and unity across centuries of division.

• visiting a Coptic Orthodox church and noticing the icon of “the 21”
• the workers’ background in Alwur and why they went to Libya for labor
• how ISIS separated Christians using IDs and cross tattoos
• captivity details and the repeated offer to recite the shahada
• Matthew Ayariga’s choice to die with the others
• the execution video as propaganda that accidentally becomes testimony
• families speaking with pride and refusing revenge
• canonization, recovered bodies, and the shrine church in their village
• Pope Francis, Pope Tawadros II, and the “ecumenism of blood”
• a parallel with Alexei Navalny and interior freedom under coercion

A single sentence could have saved their lives, and they had six weeks to say it. Instead, 21 men knelt on a Mediterranean beach in orange jumpsuits, lips moving in prayer, while their executioners filmed a spectacle meant to terrify the world. We started with a correction and ended with one of the most unsettling stories of modern Christian martyrdom: the 21 Coptic Orthodox martyrs of Libya, ordinary Egyptian construction workers whose witness exists not only in ancient texts but in high-definition footage.

We walk through how they were identified and taken in Sirte, Libya, how pressure was applied with the “door open,” and why the offer to recite the shahada matters so much when you’re thinking about faith, coercion, and what freedom really is. Then we linger on the 21st man, Matthew Ayariga of Ghana, who was given a unique chance to step away and reportedly answered, “Their God is my God,” choosing to die alongside men who had become his people.

The story doesn’t end at the beach. It keeps going through the families who speak without revenge, the Coptic Church’s swift canonization, and a historic moment when Pope Francis adds these martyrs to the Roman Martyrology, calling it the “ecumenism of blood.” We also draw a modern parallel to Alexei Navalny and the strange power of interior freedom, the kind no prison, knife, or regime can finally touch.

If this moved you, share it with a friend who’s wrestling with courage, faith, or integrity, and please subscribe and leave a review so more people can find the show. What do you think real freedom costs?

Transcript

A Correction About Martyr Images

SPEAKER_00 0:06

This is field note. So this is the first of orthodoxy podcast. So hello, welcome back. I wasn't planning on doing a fifth part of this series on field notes on freedom. I did look back and I have started this back in November. So I've been working on this Freedom outline for a better part of the year. But I need to start this episode, or this episode is basically a correction. And because of that, it it kind of that story kind of brought in a few other things. So I'm really excited now to tell this story because it was something I was aware of, but I had to do some some digging to kind of find the story. So in the last episode, I said that we have no photographs of the martyrs. And I said ancient accounts are all we have in writing, like Perpetua's Diary and Ignatius' letters copied testimony passed down through the centuries. But I had forgotten at least one martyr, modern martyr story, uh, one that I had actually seen on YouTube back when it happened. It was very disturbing. We have something no generation of Christians has ever had before. And I'm saying of Christians because this is a Christian martyrdom story. I'm sure there are other types of martyrs as well. We have a martyrdom that is now on video shot from multiple angles by the people who did the executions. So this episode is a correction. Turns out to be one of the most incredible stories, maybe

Seeing The 21 In Icons

SPEAKER_00 2:05

in this whole series now. I want to tell you about the 21. So about six months ago, I was in Orange County, and a friend of mine is Orthodox. He's Coptic Orthodox, so Egyptian Orthodox. And he he said I could visit his church sometime, and I actually wanted to, and so I did. I went to his church and it was a Wednesday chapel service, and it was about two or three hours long. And I was kind of shocked at that. And he said, Bro, it's it's like that about you know, every service is like that, and some you should see Easter and Christmas, it's like 10, 12 hours. And I was like, What do what do people do with children? He's like, bro, it's a struggle. So, anyways, while I'm in there, I'm naming, I mean, the the chapel was beautiful and had all saints painted in a pretty cool modern iconography kind of art. And I noticed a lot of it I recognized, and then there's a few parts I did not recognize, and one of them was like a crowd on the right wall. And I said, Who's that? And he goes, That's the 21. And I go, the 21? And he goes, Yeah, the the Egyptian Coptics that were martyred on the beach, and they cut their heads off with the knives. And I was like, Oh my gosh, I saw that video. That's the Coptic, those are Coptic Christians. I I kind of knew that back when I saw the video, but I didn't know much about it and it hadn't registered in my brain completely. So it happened in the winter of 2014. A group of Coptic Christian men from Upper Egypt were working construction jobs in Sirte, Libya, or Sirte. Most of them came from single poor farming village, from a single poor farming village called Alwur in Minya province. And there was no work back home, so they were plasterers, day laborers, some of them barely literate, and sending wages

How The Workers Were Taken

SPEAKER_00 4:05

back to their wives and parents and small children back home. Men doing what men from poor villages have always done, which is go work wherever the work is and endure what has to be endured. Libya, after Qaddafi, was a dangerous place to be an Egyptian Christian. And they knew that, and they went anyways, because the alternative was to continue living in abject poverty where there was no work. So they were taken in two groups. One group was seized in late December 2014 while traveling, and the larger group was taken in early January 2015. When masked gunmen raided their housing compound in Sirta, like their work compound, in the middle of the night, the gunmen reportedly worked from a list of names, and they checked identity cards, Egyptians' IDs state Egyptian IDs state your religion. And they separated the Christians from the Muslims. Some accounts add a detail. I I I don't know, it's kind of crazy that many Coptic Christians receive a small cross tattoo on their right wrist in childhood, and it marks them for discrimination their entire lives. It can't be removed, and none of them had discarded it. So the gunmen took only the Christians. So they had checked their IDs, they checked their tattoos. 20 Egyptians and one other man I'll come back to because his story deserves its own telling. Now about the captivity, once they're captured, we don't know everything about it. We don't know much about it because none of the 21 survived. So no one who was in that room lived to tell about what happened there. What we have come comes from fellow workers who escaped the raid from later investigations and from the trial of one of the perpetrators. So one of them was arrested and interrogated and so on. The accounts agree on the essentials and differ on the details. Some say the men were beaten and tortured daily and held each other together with prayer at night. The Coptic Church's own account says the captors began with persuasion, so they were nice at first and treated the men decently in hopes of winning converts. And then when they realized they could not convert these men, they turned to cruelty when they got tired of you know trying to play nice. And every account agrees that the door out of that room was open the whole time. They always had an opportunity to leave, they always had an opportunity to submit. They were held roughly six weeks before the execution. And at any point they were allowed to recite the shahada. The shahada is a single sentence, a Muslim confession of faith. It is a fundamental Islamic declaration of faith. So when you say the shahada, you're you are becoming a Muslim. It means you're bearing witness or testifying. It literally means to bear witness or testify. And it states that there's only one true God, Allah, and that Muhammad is his final messenger. And reciting it with sincere belief is the first of the five pillars of Islam. And that's how people convert to Islam. That's all they had to do was say this sentence to save their lives, to go back to their families. Six weeks they had to think about it. All they had to do was say

Six Weeks With The Door Open

SPEAKER_00 7:35

the sentence. It made me think about trying to imagine what that was like made me think about the movie Silence. I don't know if you've seen it, but there's an element of giving in outwardly to save people's lives. And the Togu Tokugawa shogunate, I don't know how to say it, but it's the government at the time, had outlawed Christianity in Japan, viewing the rapidly growing religion and its ties to European missionaries as a potential threat to political stability and Japanese sovereignty. Japanese Christians and foreign priests were forced to renounce their faith often by stepping on images of Christ on the ground, kind of in the mud. And thousands were tortured or killed when they refused, becoming martyrs while surviving, while the surviving Christian communities were driven underground for more than two centuries. So it's an amazing story of martyrdom and of underground faith that was not submitting to the empire. All they had to do was renounce Christ and step on his image. I've never had a single day of my life that pushed me to that limit of faith and what these martyrs have had to endure. And now back to the 21. These were just ordinary people, migrant workers. Nobody trained them for this. What they had was what had raised them their village, their liturgy, their fasts, the prayers, the Christmases, the Easters in the Orthodox Church, the cross on their wrist, spiritual fortitude built over a lifetime, holding up under the pressure that none of us can imagine. This is exactly what we saw in the last episode with Perpetua, the martyr who is an ordinary person, but whose inner alignment is like a bunker that the powers in the empire cannot reach. The room in Sirta was the same as Perpetua's room in Carthage. So now back to the twenty first man. His name was Matthew Ayariga, and he was from Ghana, a migrant laborer Sub Saharan Africa from Sub Saharan Africa, working alongside the Egyptians. He wasn't Coptic. By several accounts, he may not have been on anyone's list, and the captors gave him a separate chance. This wasn't supposed to be his fight. They asked him if he rejected Jesus. His answer as it has come down to us, their God is my God. He had spent those weeks watching the Egyptians pray, and when the door out was opened specifically for him, he chose to stay and die with them. Whether he was a lifelong Christian or became one in that room, we don't know. And it doesn't really make it any less amazing, either way. What we see in these 21 men looked more like life to him than to walk out that door. In the biblical story of Ruth, Ruth said something similar to Naomi on the road to Bethlehem. She said, Your people will be my people, and your God will be my God. Matthew

The 21st Man Chooses To Stay

SPEAKER_00 10:55

Ayariga said in a terrace holding cell in Libya in the 21st century he said that at the literal cost of his head. February 15th, 2015, on a beach near Sirte on the Mediterranean, the video Isis released that day was titled A Message Signed with Blood to the Nation of the Cross. Twenty-one men lined up in orange jumpsuits, each with an executioner in black standing behind him. It was staged and scored and edited like a professional media show. And it was designed to scare Christians everywhere. But the producers could not edit out the men's faces who were not freaking out. In the final seconds you can see lips moving and the audio catches the words Ya Rabbi Yasu. Oh my Lord Jesus. Now, if you've never seen that video, I'm not telling you to watch it. It is only for I don't know, it's not for everyone. I mean it literally shows people's heads getting cut off. It's hard to believe. The same prayer they're saying there, more or less, is like what Stephen prayed while he was being stoned in front of thousands hundreds of people in Acts chapter seven. So public execution used to be a lot more normal in the old days, like more primitive times. The men were not screaming or begging. Twenty-one men on their knees in the sand praying the name of Jesus. Isis filmed it to terrorize the church, but it sort of backfired. The church received it as a powerful testimony. Even with a modern level of sophisticated propaganda that they had, cameras and microphones, video and internet, the terrorists pointed their cameras at twenty one kneeling laborers and accidentally produced a martyr witness, the first one visible to the whole world in Christian history. The Islamic State's own footage proved the weakness of their violence. Similarly, Rome needed its executions to be public too, to try to scare everyone, and for the same reason those backfired too as the Christian martyrs stood up to their bully system. The composure of the martyrs is what disturbed them. It was their message as if to say, You have no authority here. Then the families. This part of the story is a pleasant surprise. Days after the video was released, a man named Bashir Kamel went on Egyptian television. Two of the murdered men were his brothers,

The Beach Video And Its Backfire

SPEAKER_00 13:40

Bishoi and Samuel. He said the family was proud. He said the video had strengthened their faith. He thanked the killers and thanked them for leaving his brother's confession of Christ in the footage, because now the whole world could hear it. And when the host asked what his mother would do if she ever met the man who killed her sons, Bashir said she would invite them into her home, because in her words they helped her sons enter the kingdom of heaven. A German writer named Martian Mosbeck traveled to Al Or to sit with these families, and he wrote a book about it called The Twenty One, which is in my queue now on Spotify when I realized it's in their audiobooks. So I built this story on what the public record has said and what his book reported. He went expecting a village in grief, but what he found there was exaltation. Condolences felt out of place because nobody was speaking of revenge. The families kept photographs of their sons in their orange jumpsuits on the walls. The family the way other families display wedding portraits and they replay the video in their living rooms. To modern ears this seems repulsive or incomprehensible. Yet it rings true that these families believe their sons won. One week after the executions, one week after Pope Tawadros II of Alexandria, the Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church, canonized all 21 as saints of the Coptic Orthodox Church. That may be the fastest formal recognition of martyrs in church history. Their bodies were found in a mass grave near Sirte in 2017 and brought home to Egypt in 2018. Matthew Ayurveda Matthew Ayariga's remains followed in 2020. And at the family's insistence, he was laid with the others in a shrine church built in their village. The Church of the Martyrs of Faith and Homeland, it's called. And to feel the weight of it, we would need to understand one piece of history. The Coptic Church and the Roman Catholic Church split in the year 451 at the Council of Chalcedon over the definition of Christ's nature. Fifteen centuries of formal division, popes of Rome and popes of Alexandria spent most of that time regarding each other as heretics. They just didn't get

Families Respond With Forgiveness

SPEAKER_00 16:45

things right. But on May 11th, 2023, Pope Francis received Pope Tawadros II at the Vatican on the fiftieth anniversary of the first meeting between their churches between their church leaders since the split. And Francis announced that the twenty one Coptic Orthodox saints, plus one Ganian, would be entered into the Roman Martyrology, the Catholic Church's official register of martyrs, with a shared feast day, february fifteenth. His words were that these men were baptized not only in water and the spirit, but also in blood. Francis has a name for this. He calls it the ecumenism of blood. Wow, literally blood brothers. This was incredible. Fifteen hundred years of theologians could not close the gap between Rome and Alexandria. But twenty one construction workers on their knees in the sand closed it enough that both churches now can venerate and worship God and honor these saints on the same day. The martyrs demonstrated something that both sides recognize instantly as the real thing, because the real thing is unmistakable when you see it on film. As a terrorist murdered them that day, they had no idea that they were inadvertently uniting the church. So that's my correction. We do have photographs of modern martyrs. We even have video footage shot by the perpetrators of 21 free men. Free by the definition, this world this whole series has been working towards. Men whose interior lives were already held too deep for those knives on that beach. Solsenitsyn's prisoner said it to the secret police minister, When you've robbed a man of everything, he's no longer in your power. Russia proved that sentence again in our own decade, Alexei Nelvani spent years exposing Putin's corruption, and in 2020 the FSB, which used to be called the KGB, poisoned him with a nerve agent. He survived and recovered in Germany, and then did the thing that nobody could believe. He got back on a plane to Moscow, knowing exactly what awaited

Ecumenism Of Blood And Navalny

SPEAKER_00 19:05

him when he got there back to passport control. I've watched some of the documentary about this stretch of his life. It's called Navalny Navalny, it's on Netflix. It's just him and his wife and people around them. And what stays with you is his calm, and he literally is unafraid. Everyone around him is terrified, and he's cracking jokes on his way to his own arrest. At his trial he told the court he had once been a militant atheist, and that now he was a believer, and he quoted the sermon on the mount. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. He said his faith made his work easier because the instructions were already written down. My job is to seek the king this is a quote. My job is to seek the kingdom of God and his righteousness, he said, and leave it to good old Jesus and the rest of his family to deal with everything else. His prison journals published after his death in a memoir called Patriot show that this held all the way through, a man in an Arctic penal colony, starved and isolated, still writing about Christ and still refusing to spare. He died in that colony on february sixteenth, twenty twenty four, one day after the feast of the twenty one. He had already recorded the message he wanted played if they killed him. If they decide to kill me, it means we are incredibly strong. You're not allowed to give up. Isis took everything from these men except the one thing they truly owned, and the cameras documented the failure of the executioners to strike terror that they were thirsting for. The Feast of the Twenty One is February 15th. Two churches divided since before Islam existed, coming back together because of the 21. February 16th is when Navalny was killed. When he died. Some of these martyrs went out singing, all of them went out praying, and the whole world got to watch.