The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Martyrs' Church
Alexander of Jerusalem
died c. 251Early Church
The confessor who built Jerusalem's Christian library and died in chains at Caesarea under Decius.
Summary
- Lived died c. 251.
- Stood in The Martyrs' Church (AD 100–313).
- Hangs on The Fathers and The Martyrs.
- Tradition: Early Church.
The life
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.
What was happening while he lived3 moments · AD 100–313
- 177The martyrs of Lyons and VienneMob violence in Gaul turned into arrests, torture, and days in the amphitheater. The churches there wrote an account that Eusebius preserved (*Church History* 5.1). Two names stayed: Pothinus, the bishop, over ninety years old, who died in prison, and Blandina, a slave woman whose owners feared she would break first and who outlasted them all.
- c. 203Perpetua and Felicity die in the arenaVibia Perpetua, a young mother of good family in Carthage, and Felicity, a pregnant slave woman, were arrested with several companions. Perpetua kept a prison diary that survives inside *The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity*, one of the earliest firsthand writings we have from a Christian woman. Felicity gave birth in prison days before they were sent out to the beasts.
- 250Decius orders the whole empire to sacrificeFor the first time the persecution was universal by decree: every inhabitant had to sacrifice before a commission and receive a signed certificate proving it. About forty-odd of those certificates have been dug up in Egypt on papyrus, ordinary paperwork of a very hard year. Fabian, bishop of Rome, was killed in January 250; thousands of others simply signed and lived, and the church spent the next decade arguing about what to do with them.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Alexander of Jerusalem at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Built Jerusalem's great Christian library and died in chains at Caesarea.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received. Hangs on The Martyrs: The witnesses who paid with their lives, from the arena at Carthage to the present day, and the confessors who paid with everything short of their lives.
Standing beside himThe Martyrs' Church · 40 on this stretch of wall
A 22-year-old mother who kept a diary in prison and walked into the arena at Carthage singing.
Stayed with his people through plague and persecution, then walked to his own beheading and paid the executioner.
Traced his teaching straight back to the apostle John through Polycarp, and wrote the first great takedown of the gnostics.
Kept wearing his philosopher's cloak after he met Christ, argued the faith to the emperor's face, and was beheaded for it.
Wanted to die with his martyred father as a boy, and spent the rest of his life laying six versions of the Old Testament side by side.
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The lawyer who gave the church the word Trinity and told Rome that the blood of the martyrs is seed.