Alexander of Jerusalem

Alexander studied in Alexandria alongside Origen, under Pantaenus and then Clement, before he went home to Cappadocia and was made a bishop there. The persecution under Septimius Severus put him in prison for several years, beginning around 204. He came out carrying the title the early church honored most after martyr: confessor — a man who had said the name of Christ under threat and had not taken it back. Around 212 he traveled to Jerusalem to pray at the holy places. He never went home. The aged bishop Narcissus, said by Eusebius to be well over a hundred, kept him there as co-bishop. It is the first arrangement of that kind on record. Alexander then led the church of Jerusalem for close to forty years. What he built there outlasted everything else he did. Alexander gathered a library at Jerusalem — letters, church records, and books collected from across the empire. Eusebius says plainly that he used that library himself when he wrote his history a century later. Without Alexander's shelves, much of what we know about the first two Christian centuries would simply be gone. He also protected Origen when few others would. While Origen was in Palestine, Alexander and Theoctistus of Caesarea invited him to preach in church although he was still a layman, and later ordained him a presbyter outright. Demetrius of Alexandria was furious and wrote to say so. Alexander did not back down, and Origen's work continued. Decius became emperor in 249, and the order to sacrifice went out across the empire. Alexander, by then very old, was arrested and brought before the governor at Caesarea. Eusebius says he confessed Christ a second time, was thrown to wild beasts that would not touch him, and was sent back to prison. He died in chains there, about 251. Jerusalem remembered him as a martyr. He had led a small congregation in a city Rome had leveled and rebuilt as a pagan colony, and he died a prisoner in another city. But the books he collected kept working for hundreds of years after the man who collected them was dust. Sources: Eusebius, Church History VI.8, 11, 14, 19–20, 39; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, article Alexander of Jerusalem.