Pamphilus of Caesarea

Pamphilus was born wealthy at Berytus — modern Beirut — and could have had the public career his family expected. He studied at Alexandria under Pierius, who was called the younger Origen, and then settled at Caesarea in Palestine as a presbyter, and there he did the thing he is remembered for. He built a library. Origen had left his books at Caesarea when he died. Pamphilus took that collection and spent his inheritance turning it into the greatest Christian library in the world — hunting down manuscripts, employing copyists, and correcting texts himself. Jerome, who used the library a century later, says Pamphilus copied out most of Origen's works in his own hand, and that he kept a stock of Bibles which he gave away free to anyone, man or woman, who would read them. He gave books to the poor the way other rich men gave bread. That library is the reason we have a church history at all. A young man named Eusebius attached himself to Pamphilus, worked beside him, and loved him so much that he took his name — signing himself Eusebius Pamphili, Eusebius of Pamphilus, for the rest of his life. The Church History, which preserves most of what is known about the first three Christian centuries, was written out of Pamphilus's shelves. Eusebius also wrote a three-book Life of Pamphilus, now lost. In November 307, under the persecution of Maximinus, Pamphilus was arrested, tortured, and imprisoned. He was not released. He stayed in that cell for two years. He kept working in it. Together with Eusebius, who visited him, he composed a five-book Apology for Origen — a defense of his master against the charges already gathering — writing from prison the arguments that a later century would reject. Only the first book survives, in a Latin translation by Rufinus. On 16 February 309 Pamphilus was brought out and beheaded, along with eleven others. Eusebius watched, and wrote the account down in The Martyrs of Palestine, and he is not a detached historian in those pages. He names the men who died with him. He calls Pamphilus the most beloved of all. The library survived him by three hundred years, and then it too was gone. What came out of it did not go with it. Sources: Eusebius, The Martyrs of Palestine 7 and 11; Eusebius, Church History VII.32, VIII.13; Jerome, On Illustrious Men 75; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, article St. Pamphilus.