[8] Warned by God in a dream the previous night about his impending martyrdom, Pionius is arrested, gives a speech to local Jews and Greeks, is put on trial, imprisoned and tortured, then killed.
"[10]: 170 The Empire-wide measures taken under Decius in 250 AD required everyone to provide sacrifices and eat sacrificial meat, one of the four things forbidden to Christians by the original Apostles in Acts 21:25.
"[11]: 539 The author of the Passio in the mid-third century says the upper galleries of the square were packed with Greeks, Hebrews and women who had the day off because of the Grand Shabbat.
[15] Jan Kozlowski, following L. Robert, has argued that various details of the text indicate that it was written in the third century AD, not long after the Decian persecution.
[16] Robin Lane Fox has also argued strongly for the reliability of the account, describing it as 'a text of rare authority, true to its first contemporary form'.
[17] Bart Ehrman argues that the narrative shows traces of "literary license, if not wholesale invention" in the way that it echoes the earlier story of Polycarp, who died in 155 AD.
[18] Theologian Arthur Cushman McGiffert says "Ruinart's Acta Martyrum Sincera is a Latin narrative of the martyrdom of Pionius which appears to be substantially the same as the document which Eusebius used in the Greek.
[12] McGiffert says: "The Life of Polycarp which purports to have been written by Pionius, is manifestly spurious and entirely untrustworthy, and belongs to the latter part of the fourth century.
Emperor Marcus Aurelius' mandata (mandates) to the provincial governors to impose severe punishments on the sacrilegious were believed by the Bishop of Sardeis to be triggering manhunts.
In the Historia Ecclesiae 4.14-15, Eusebius gives an account of the martyrdom of Polycarp, which is well attested, and other martyrs of the same period, and includes: "... Pionius, who made some excellent apologies for the Christian faith, were likewise burnt.
We learn from a notice in the document by Ruinart that Pionius ... and the others were put to death during the persecution of Decius in 250 AD and this date is confirmed by external evidence.
"This explains the presence of "Greeks, Hebrews, and women" and corresponds with a report by Lactantius, according to which Diocletian, at the instigation of Galerius, put in hand the Great Persecution precisely in the Terminalia."
Within the narrative accounts and the literary reconstruction of the martyrs words and experiences, lay the virtues, doctrine and values held by the oppressed group.
[10]: 33, footnote Priest and theologian Mauricio Saavedra Monroy says "the Martyrdom of Pionius records the "progressive disencounter [the ongoing process of separation] between the Jews of the day and the Christian minority."