The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Fathers & the Creeds
Epiphanius of Salamis
died c. 403Patristic
Bishop of Cyprus and the church's fiercest heresy-hunter, who catalogued the sects in a book he called the Medicine Chest.
Summary
- Lived died c. 403.
- Stood in The Fathers & the Creeds (AD 313–600).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Eastern.
The life
Epiphanius was born about 315 near Eleutheropolis in Palestine, in a region where Jews, Samaritans, Christians and half a dozen sects lived on top of one another. He went to Egypt as a young man, saw the monks, and, he says, narrowly escaped a gnostic group that tried to recruit him, whose books he later reported to the bishop. He came home and founded a monastery near his birthplace, and ran it for about thirty years.
In 367 he was made bishop of Salamis, the chief city of Cyprus, and he held the see until his death thirty-six years later. He knew Greek, Syriac, Hebrew, Coptic and some Latin; Jerome called him the five-tongued man.
His great work is the Panarion, which means "medicine chest." Written between 374 and 377, it describes eighty heresies in order, from before Christ to his own day, and prescribes an antidote for each. His stated purpose was practical: an ordinary believer should be able to recognize a false teaching when it walks in the door.
As history it is uneven, he repeats gossip, he is credulous, and his summaries are sometimes unfair. As a source it is irreplaceable. For a number of early sects, the Panarion preserves the only surviving quotations of their actual writings; Epiphanius copied out documents in full because he wanted his readers to see the thing itself. Scholars who have no use for his judgments still cannot work without his evidence.
He also wrote the Ancoratus, a book on the faith to steady believers being tossed about; On Weights and Measures, which is a key witness to the Greek versions of the Old Testament; and a treatise on the twelve stones of the high priest's breastplate.
His last years were spent hunting Origenism. He pressed John of Jerusalem to condemn Origen, ordained Jerome's brother inside John's diocese without permission, and helped set off a feud that consumed Jerome and Rufinus for years. In 402 Theophilus of Alexandria drew him to Constantinople to help bring down John Chrysostom. He arrived, refused Chrysostom's hospitality, held services outside the rules, and then evidently realized what he had been used for. He sailed for home and died at sea in 403, aged about eighty-eight.
Sources: Epiphanius of Salamis, The Panarion, translated by Frank Williams; Jerome, Letters and On Illustrious Men; Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, VI; The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "St. Epiphanius".
What was happening while he lived7 moments · AD 313–600
- 335Athanasius is exiled for the first timeThe bishop of Alexandria, who had been at Nicaea as a young deacon, was banished to Trier in Germany after a rigged synod. Four more exiles followed; he spent roughly seventeen of his forty-five years as bishop away from his city.
- 367Athanasius's Easter letter lists the twenty-sevenHis thirty-ninth Festal Letter names exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament we use today, the earliest surviving list that matches ours. Councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) confirmed the same list in the West.
- 380Nicene Christianity becomes the empire's official religionThe Edict of Thessalonica, issued by Theodosius I, commanded all his subjects to hold the faith of Nicaea. Legal protection had become legal privilege, and pressure on everyone else.
- 381The Council of ConstantinopleAround a hundred and fifty bishops confirmed Nicaea and expanded its article on the Holy Spirit, who "proceeds from the Father" and "together with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified." This 381 text is the creed most churches actually recite as the Nicene Creed.
- 386Augustine converts in a Milan gardenA thirty-one-year-old professor of rhetoric, weeping under a fig tree, heard a child's voice chanting "take up and read," opened Paul's letter to the Romans, and stopped running. His mother Monica had prayed for him for years; Bishop Ambrose's preaching had already broken his objections.
- c. 397–400Augustine writes the *Confessions*He told his whole story, theft, ambition, a long affair, a slow surrender, as one long prayer addressed to God. Nothing quite like it had been written before, and it invented the spiritual autobiography.
- c. 405Jerome finishes translating the Old Testament from HebrewCommissioned by Bishop Damasus in 382, Jerome worked for decades in Bethlehem, learning Hebrew so he could go behind the Greek to the original. His Latin Bible, later called the Vulgate, was the Bible of the West for a thousand years.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Epiphanius of Salamis at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Catalogued eighty heresies so ordinary believers could recognize one coming, and learned four languages to do it.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Fathers & the Creeds · 130 on this stretch of wall
Exiled five separate times for refusing to say the Son was anything less than God, they called it Athanasius against the world.
Made a Roman emperor stand outside the church door until he repented of a massacre.
Heard 'sell what you have' read aloud in church, walked into the Egyptian desert, and started monasticism.
A brilliant, restless sinner whose mother prayed for him thirty years; his Confessions still read like a man talking straight to God.
Built an entire town for the sick and the poor outside his city, and wrote the rule Eastern monks still live by.
Preached five sermons in a tiny borrowed chapel that settled how the whole church speaks about the Trinity.