Gregory of Neocaesarea

He was born Theodore, around 213, into a wealthy pagan family in Neocaesarea in Pontus, on the Black Sea coast of what is now Turkey. His father died when he was fourteen. He was trained for law and Latin, and set out with his brother for the famous law school at Beirut.

They escorted their sister as far as Caesarea in Palestine, and there they met Origen. Gregory later said he was caught like a hunted animal, and stayed five years. Origen taught him logic, physics, geometry, astronomy, ethics, the philosophers, and then the Scriptures. When Gregory left he wrote a farewell address that survives, one of the warmest tributes any student has ever paid a teacher, and almost the only firsthand description we have of how Origen actually taught.

Back home, he tried to hide in the countryside and study. The bishop of Amasea found him and consecrated him bishop of Neocaesarea anyway, around 240.

The story his own city told, written down a century later by Gregory of Nyssa, is that when he arrived there were seventeen Christians in Neocaesarea, and when he died there were seventeen pagans left in it. Gregory of Nyssa got the account from his grandmother Macrina, who had been raised on it.

They called him Thaumaturgus, the Wonderworker. The accounts credit him with healings, with moving a boulder by prayer, with drying a marsh, with confronting a river in flood by planting his staff at the water's edge. How much is history and how much is a grateful city's memory cannot now be sorted out; what is certain is that a pagan region became Christian in one lifetime.

Gregory of Nyssa also records that early in his ministry Gregory received a creed in a night vision, in which John the Evangelist appeared at the direction of Mary the mother of the Lord and gave him the words. It is the earliest recorded vision of Mary in Christian history, and the creed itself, a short, clear statement of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, was still being copied in Neocaesarea generations later in what was said to be his own hand.

When the Decian persecution came in 250 he told his people to flee, and fled with them rather than lose them. When Gothic raiders swept through Pontus around 254, leaving villages ruined and Christians who had joined the looting, he wrote a Canonical Epistle laying out how the church should deal with each kind of collaborator, a calm administrative document written in the smoke.

He died about 270.

Sources: Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Gregory Thaumaturgus; Eusebius, Church History VI.30; the works of Gregory Thaumaturgus, including the Oration and Panegyric Addressed to Origen and the Canonical Epistle (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 6).