c. 296–373 CE · bishop of Alexandria · theologian
Athanasius of Alexandria
Ἀθανάσιος
In Alexandria: 328–373 CE
Bishop from 328, five times exiled, the champion of Nicaea against Arius. His Life of Antony made the Egyptian desert monk a model for Christendom, and his Festal Letter of 367 is the first to list the twenty-seven books of the New Testament as the canon.
Their life and work
As a deacon he went with Bishop Alexander to the council of Nicaea in 325, and three years later succeeded him. His five exiles, under four emperors, are the frame of his life: to Trier, to Rome, twice into the Egyptian desert, where the monks hid him, and once, under Valens, to a hiding place just outside the city, his family's tomb as Socrates tells it. His Against the Arians and his history of their persecution of him are partisan, and modern historians read his account of his opponents with care. The Festal Letter of 367 rejects books it calls apocryphal.
Some modern scholars, following James M. Robinson's introduction to The Nag Hammadi Library in English, connect that letter with the burial of the Nag Hammadi codices. The link leans on date and place: the cover of one of them, Codex VII, was stiffened with papers dated 341 to 348, and the books were found near early Pachomian monasteries in Upper Egypt. It is widely repeated but unproved. Conjectured
Our device: Their emblem is a festal letter. No portrait of any of these people survives. The emblems are our devices.
On the shelves
- Athanasius of Alexandria, Thirty-Ninth Festal Letter · 367 CE · Survives in large part
In the show
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Sources (6)
- Athanasius, Festal Letter 39
- C. Haas, Alexandria in Late Antiquity: Topography and Social Conflict (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)
- Athanasius, Apology against the Arians 1–90
- Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 1.8; 2.11; 4.13
- B. A. Pearson, Gnosticism and Christianity in Roman and Coptic Egypt (New York: T&T Clark, 2004)
- J. M. Robinson (ed.), The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 3rd rev. ed. (Leiden: Brill; San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988), introduction 16–20