Pamphilus of Caesarea and his Companions

Origins and the school of Caesarea

Pamphilus was born about the middle of the third century at Berytus (Beirut) in Phoenicia, of a rich and honourable family, and gave himself first to the studies for which that city was famous. Turning wholly to Christ, he distributed his wealth to the poor and went to Alexandria, where he studied under Pierius, the head of the catechetical school there and a devoted heir of Origen's learning. From Pierius Pamphilus received both the discipline of scriptural scholarship and the lifelong love of Origen's writings that would mark all his work. He settled at last at Caesarea Maritima, the seat of the Roman governor of Palestine and the city where Origen had spent his later years, and there he was ordained presbyter of the church.

The library of Origen and the labour of the Scriptures

At Caesarea Pamphilus became "the chief among the biblical scholars of his generation" (as Eusebius's memory of him runs), and the centre of his life's work was the library. Origen, dwelling at Caesarea after leaving Alexandria, had gathered there a collection of Christian books unequalled in the East, and had laboured over the Hexapla — the six-columned edition of the Old Testament in Hebrew and the Greek versions side by side. Pamphilus made himself the guardian, the restorer, and the enlarger of this treasure: he copied and corrected manuscripts with his own hand, maintained a scriptorium of scribes, and lent and gave away books freely to any who would study. Copies of the Scriptures "corrected by the hand of Pamphilus" were prized for centuries — several surviving biblical manuscripts carry colophons noting that they were checked against Pamphilus's own emended text of the Caesarean library. Through this work the text of the Greek Old Testament and much of Origen's corpus were transmitted to later ages; it is not too much to say that a great part of what survives of early Christian learning passed through Pamphilus's hands.

Eusebius Pamphili

The bond for which Pamphilus is best remembered outside the calendar is his friendship with Eusebius, the future bishop of Caesarea and father of Church history. Eusebius was Pamphilus's pupil, fellow-labourer in the library, and so inseparable a companion that he called himself "Eusebius Pamphili" — Eusebius, Pamphilus's own — carrying the martyr's name as a son carries a father's. From prison the two together composed an Apology for Origen in five books, defending their master's memory against the charges already gathering against him; Eusebius added a sixth book after Pamphilus's death. Eusebius also wrote a Life of Pamphilus in three books — now lost, but drawn on in his own Ecclesiastical History and Martyrs of Palestine — and it is to this eye-witness devotion that we owe almost everything we know of the martyr and his companions. Pamphilus is thus doubly a father of Christian letters: in his own scholarship, and in the historian he formed.

Arrest and imprisonment

The persecution begun under Diocletian in 303 fell with special violence on Palestine under the Caesars Galerius and then Maximinus (Maximinus Daia), and its instrument at Caesarea was the governor Urbanus and, after him, Firmilianus. About November 307 Pamphilus was seized, brought before Urbanus, and — refusing to sacrifice — was cruelly tortured, his sides torn, and then committed to prison. There he remained some two years, and the prison became a kind of school: he continued to teach, to encourage the confessors, and, with Eusebius, to write. The long imprisonment only deepened the veneration in which the church of Caesarea held him.

Martyrdom

In the seventh year of the persecution, on February 16, Pamphilus was at last brought out with two who shared his confession and his death. Eusebius, who was present, names them and those who followed:

• Pamphilus, presbyter of Caesarea, the "ornament" of that church;
• Valens, deacon of the church of Aelia (Jerusalem), a venerable old man grey with age and so versed in the Scriptures that he could recite them from memory;
• Paul, of the city of Jamnia, fervent in spirit, who had already borne the cautery of the confessors in an earlier trial.

These three, after a last refusal to sacrifice, were sentenced to be beheaded. While sentence was being carried out, there came to the gate of the city five Egyptian brethren who had escorted a company of confessors condemned to the mines of Cilicia and were returning home. Stopped and questioned, they confessed Christ and were seized. When Firmilianus demanded the name of their leader, the man — refusing his Egyptian name — answered with the name of a prophet, and so his companions after him; and thus the record keeps them as Elias, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Samuel and Daniel, for, Eusebius says, they had put off the names their parents gave them, taken perhaps from the idols, and put on the names of the prophets of God. They too were beheaded.

Then the martyrdom drew in others by the very act of honouring it:

• Porphyrius, a youth not yet eighteen, the beloved servant and disciple of Pamphilus, skilled in letters, who — hearing the sentence — came forward and asked for the bodies of the slain that they might be buried. For this he was seized, torn, and, when he would not yield, burned alive over a slow fire, crowned before his master;
• Seleucus, a Cappadocian, once a distinguished soldier who had been scourged and discharged for his confession, who witnessed Porphyrius's end and ran to tell Pamphilus, and who, saluting the martyrs, was at once taken and beheaded by the governor's command;
• Theodulus, a grave and pious old man of the very household of Firmilianus the governor, honoured by all, who embraced one of the martyrs as he was led past; brought before his master, he was condemned to the death of the Lord and crucified;
• Julian, another Cappadocian, newly come to the city, who kissed the bodies of the martyrs where they lay; caught in the act, he was led away and burned upon a slow fire.

The bodies were left unburied, exposed by day and guarded by night, that beasts and birds might devour them; but — the tradition, following Eusebius, records — for days no creature touched them, until at last the Christians were suffered to take them and lay them to rest. Twelve in all, they are kept together on the day of Pamphilus their head.

Veneration and legacy

Pamphilus was venerated at once and everywhere his name was known. His pupil Eusebius made his memory a lasting monument in the Martyrs of Palestine and the Ecclesiastical History, and carried his name as his own to the end of his life. Jerome, who used the Caesarean library and prized the manuscripts corrected by Pamphilus, praised his humility and his boundless generosity with books, and reckoned him among the illustrious men of the Church. The Greek Menaion and the Synaxarion keep him on February 16 as the leader of the company of Caesarea, and the Roman martyrology commemorates him on June 1. Above the particular details of his passion, he is remembered as the type of the scholar-martyr: the man who spent his life over the sacred text and sealed it with his blood.