Dionysius of Alexandria

Dionysius was born to a wealthy pagan family in Alexandria and came to Christ as an adult. He studied under Origen, took over the catechetical school around 231, and in 248 became bishop of the greatest city in the eastern empire. He held the post for seventeen years and spent most of them in trouble.

The trouble started before his election. In 248 an Alexandrian mob attacked Christians, dragging an old man named Metras through the streets, stoning a woman named Quinta, burning the aged virgin Apollonia. Dionysius described it in a letter, and Eusebius copied the letter down.

Then came Decius in 250. Dionysius was arrested and rescued, against his will, by a wedding party of country people who carried him off. He spent the persecution in the desert.

Then the plague, in 250 and after. His Easter letter about it is one of the most-quoted documents of the ancient world. He wrote that the pagans pushed the sick away, threw the half-dead into the road, and fled from their own families, while the Christians nursed the sick, took the disease onto themselves, and died in their place, and he named them, and said the death they died was no worse than martyrdom. Historians still cite that letter when they explain how a small sect became the religion of the empire.

Then Valerian in 257. Dionysius was tried, refused, and was exiled to Kephro in the Libyan desert, where he found himself preaching to people who had never heard the name of Christ and building a congregation in the place of his punishment.

He was also a careful reader. Facing an Egyptian movement that took the thousand-year reign of Revelation in a crudely literal, materialist way, he did not ban the book. He read it. He compared its Greek word by word to the Gospel and letters of John and concluded that the same man could not have written both: the vocabulary differs, the Gospel never names its author while Revelation names John four times, and the Greek of Revelation is irregular where the Gospel's is smooth.

He said clearly that the book was inspired and holy, and that some other John wrote it. That is the first piece of literary criticism of the New Testament on record, and every modern discussion of Revelation's authorship still walks the road he cut.

He died in 264 or 265, worn out, having been asked to attend one more council about one more heresy. The church called him Dionysius the Great.

Sources: Eusebius, Church History VI.40–42, VII.1–28; the letters of Dionysius (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 6); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2.