Dorotheus of Tyre

Origins and the see of Tyre

Dorotheus belonged to the church of Phoenicia, in the metropolitan province of Tyre — a great commercial city on the Syrian coast whose Christian community was ancient and, in the fourth century, one of the more consequential in the Antiochene sphere. The tradition makes him a man of unusual education: skilled in Greek and Latin letters as well as in Hebrew, and thoroughly versed in the Scriptures, which he is said to have been able to expound in several tongues. He is described as having been ordained presbyter and then raised to the episcopate of Tyre.

Some ancient and modern writers identify him with the Dorotheus, presbyter of Antioch whom Eusebius of Caesarea knew personally and praised in his Church History (VII.32) — a learned man, eunuch from birth, a diligent student of the Hebrew Scriptures and of liberal learning, whom Eusebius heard expounding the Scriptures in the church at Antioch under Bishop Cyril, and whom the emperor (Diocletian) honoured with the superintendence of the imperial purple-dye works at Tyre. The identification is attractive — the learning, the languages, the association with Tyre all agree — but it is not certain, and it is discussed under Disputed questions below.

The Great Persecution and the peace of the Church

When the persecution of Diocletian broke over the eastern provinces (from 303), Dorotheus, on the counsel of his own flock and following the Lord's word that when they persecute you in one city you should flee to another, withdrew from Tyre and hid himself through the years of the terror, keeping his life for the service of the Church rather than courting a martyrdom he was not yet called to. With the victory of Constantine and the peace granted to the Church, he returned to his city and resumed the government of his see, and he lived through the long middle decades of the century — the Arian troubles, the councils, the reigns of Constantius and Gallus — teaching, ordaining, and confirming his people in the faith of Nicaea, until he was very old.

Martyrdom under Julian the Apostate

In 361 the emperor Julian, nephew of Constantine and reared a Christian, publicly renounced Christ, restored the temples and the sacrifices, and set the whole machinery of the state to the humiliation of the Church. Julian's policy was less often bloody than mocking, but in Phoenicia and Palestine it produced real martyrs. Dorotheus, by now a very old man, would not be silent: he confessed Christ openly and refused the sacrifices. He was arrested and brought before the governor, and, when neither flattery nor threat could bend him, he was subjected to tortures — beatings and the tearing of his aged flesh — under which he gave up his soul, about the year 362, in the one hundred and seventh year of his life.

A strand of the tradition places this not at Tyre but at Odyssopolis in Thrace (the modern Varna, ancient Odessos), whither Dorotheus is said to have travelled or been taken; the synaxaria are divided, and both places are recorded below rather than harmonised.

The writings ascribed to him

Dorotheus's ancient reputation as a scholar of the Scriptures attached his name to a body of learned material. In particular, the Byzantine tradition transmits a Synopsis on the lives and deaths of the prophets, the apostles and the disciples of the Lord under the name of "Dorotheus, Bishop of Tyre" — a catalogue that, with the parallel lists ascribed to Hippolytus and to the Chronicon Paschale tradition, lies behind the standard Byzantine enumerations of the Seventy Apostles and behind many of the individual synaxarion notices of them. Modern scholarship regards the text as a later compilation falsely ascribed to him (a "pseudo-Dorotheus"), assembled well after the fourth century; but the ascription is itself old evidence of how thoroughly the Church remembered this bishop as a man of books. He is on that account sometimes styled "Dorotheus the Historian."