Paul of Neocaesarea
Our Father among the Saints Paul the Confessor, Bishop of Neocaesarea
Confessor · Bishop · d. 4th century
Commemorated 23 December
Paul, bishop of Neocaesarea on the Euphrates, was a confessor of the last great persecution — that of the emperor Licinius (reigned 308–324) in the Christian East. Arrested and tried for the faith, he confessed Christ firmly, was scourged and starved, and finally had both his hands scorched and crippled with red-hot iron before being imprisoned in a fortress on the Euphrates. Released when Constantine's victory brought the persecution to an end, he took his place among the 318 Fathers of the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325, his maimed hands a living testimony to the faith the Council defined. He is commemorated on December 23, within the Forefeast of the Nativity.
Paul was bishop of Neocaesarea, a city on the upper Euphrates in the borderland of Cappadocia and Armenia (to be distinguished from the better-known Neocaesarea in Pontus, the see of Gregory the Wonderworker). His episcopate fell in the opening decades of the fourth century, during the uneasy years when the eastern Augustus Licinius, once Constantine's ally and co-author of the Edict of Milan, turned against the Church and reopened persecution in his dominions.
Brought to trial under Licinius, Paul confessed his faith without flinching. The synaxarion records the stages of his ordeal: he was beaten, and then tortured by starvation, kept without food to break his resolve; when he still would not yield, his tormentors held his hands to red-hot iron and burned them, paralysing and disfiguring them. He was then sent under guard to a fortress on the bank of the Euphrates and shut up in prison. He did not die of these sufferings, and so is honoured as a confessor rather than a martyr — one who bore the marks of Christ in his body and lived.
His deliverance came with the political revolution of 324. When Constantine defeated Licinius and became sole emperor, he ended the persecution and freed the confessors held throughout the East. Paul returned to his see. In the following year, 325, the emperor summoned the bishops of the world to Nicaea for the First Ecumenical Council, and Paul was among the 318 Fathers who gathered there to confront the heresy of Arius and to confess the Son "of one essence with the Father." The historian Theodoret, listing the confessors present at Nicaea whose bodies bore the wounds of the recent persecution, names Paul of Neocaesarea among them — his hands, deadened by the hot iron, a witness the whole Council could see. The tradition treasures the scene, related of the maimed confessors at Nicaea, in which the emperor Constantine reverently kissed their scars, honouring in them the wounds borne for Christ.
Paul survived the Council and reposed in peace at an uncertain date in the mid-fourth century, his hands never healed. The Church keeps him among the confessors and hierarchs.
Feast and commemoration
December 23 (church date; Old Calendar civil January 5), kept in the Byzantine rite within the Forefeast of the Nativity. The Greek Synaxarion for the day commemorates him expressly as "Paul, Archbishop of Neocaesarea, one of the three hundred and eighteen Holy Fathers who were at Nicaea," binding his memory to the First Ecumenical Council.
Iconography
Paul is depicted as a bishop — in the omophorion, holding a Gospel book and blessing — in the manner of a hierarch-confessor. His distinguishing attribute, where the iconography marks it, is his hands: shown maimed or scarred, the sign of his confession under Licinius, the same detail that identified him among the Fathers at Nicaea.