The Anatolian Church in the Third Century

Gregory of Neocaesarea went south to study law and came back a bishop. He had fallen in with Origen at Caesarea instead, stayed five years, and left with a farewell address that is one of the warmest descriptions of a teacher anyone wrote in antiquity. What he did in Pontus after that is mostly legend - the story that he found seventeen Christians in the city and left seventeen pagans is a century later than he is - but one document survives that is not legend at all. When Gothic raiders came through in the 250s, Gregory wrote a canonical letter working out what to do about Christians who had looted alongside them, or informed, or kept what the raiders left: a bishop dealing with a wrecked province, case by case. A generation later and further south, Methodius, bishop of Olympus in Lycia, wrote the Banquet of the Ten Virgins - a Christian rewriting of Plato's Symposium in which ten women take turns praising chastity - and became the first substantial critic of Origen, whose most devoted pupil had been Gregory. He died in the persecution around 311.