The Church of Roman Palestine before Constantine

When Origen left Alexandria for good around 231 he went to Caesarea on the Palestinian coast, and taught there for the last twenty years of his life. What grew around him outlasted him by a long way. His books stayed, and a presbyter named Pamphilus spent his life and his money enlarging them into the best Christian library in the world - the place where the Hexapla sat, where texts were corrected and copied, and where a young man called Eusebius learned to work, and afterwards called himself Eusebius of Pamphilus out of loyalty to his teacher. Up the road at Jerusalem, Bishop Alexander had built a library of his own and was collecting letters and records; further inland at Emmaus, Julius Africanus - soldier, scholar, and correspondent of Origen - wrote the first Christian universal chronicle and a careful little treatise on why the two gospel genealogies of Jesus do not agree. Then the persecution came. Pamphilus was killed in 310 and Alexander had already died in prison; Eusebius wrote down what he had watched happen to his own province, name by name, and afterwards used the library to write the history of the church.