Theonas of Alexandria

Theonas was bishop of Alexandria from about 282 to 300, following Maximus. His term covered the last long stretch of peace the Egyptian church would have before the Great Persecution, and he handed the see to Peter, who was beheaded for it eleven years later. What is recorded of his eighteen years is mostly institutional. He is credited with building or dedicating a large church in Alexandria that carried his name for centuries afterward and was still standing when the Arabs took the city. He appointed Pierius, one of the finest scholars of the age, to head the catechetical school. In 295, when the usurper Domitius Domitianus and his general Achilleus held Alexandria against Diocletian and the city was besieged for eight months and then sacked, Theonas is said to have stayed and worked among the people through it. He is best known, though, for a letter that is almost certainly not his. The Epistle of Theonas to Lucianus, Chief Chamberlain is a beautiful document. It is addressed to a Christian holding high office in Diocletian's own household, and it tells him how to live honestly there: serve the emperor faithfully because all authority is from God; take no bribes; do not use access for profit; be scrupulous with the imperial accounts; be courteous to petitioners; find time in the day for Scripture. It describes Christians in the palace in charge of the wardrobe, the treasury, and the imperial library, and it advises a believer to be so good at his job that his religion becomes credible through his work. It was quoted for centuries as a window into Christian life at the top of the Roman state. It is a forgery. Pierre Batiffol first argued it, and Adolf von Harnack agreed: the letter is almost certainly the work of Jérôme Vignier, a seventeenth-century French scholar who manufactured several ancient documents and whose fabrications were only unmasked long after they entered the standard collections. The letter had been accepted as genuine as early as 1672 and printed in the great patristic series; it appears in the Ante-Nicene Fathers under Theonas's name to this day. So the record on Theonas is honest and thin. He governed Alexandria for eighteen years, built a church, chose a good teacher, stayed through a siege, and died in 300 with his church intact and about to be tested. The most quoted thing attributed to him was written thirteen hundred years after he died. Sources: Eusebius, Church History VII.32; the Epistle of Theonas to Lucianus (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 6), with the forgery argument of Pierre Batiffol and Adolf von Harnack; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, article Theonas; Henry Wace, Dictionary of Christian Biography.