Procopius of Gaza

Procopius was born about 465 at Gaza, on the coast of Palestine, and died there about 528. He spent his working life as a teacher of rhetoric, and he was the leading figure in what historians call the school of Gaza, a circle of Christian professors who taught classical Greek literature and philosophy in a thoroughly Christian city, and saw no contradiction in it. His pupils and colleagues included his brother Zacharias and his successor Choricius.

He was offered chairs elsewhere, including at Caesarea and, it is said, at Alexandria, and turned them down to stay home.

His secular writings show the man: model speeches, letters in polished Attic Greek, a panegyric on the emperor Anastasius, and a famous description in prose of a painted picture, a set-piece exercise of the kind educated Greeks admired. He also wrote a refutation of the pagan Neoplatonist Proclus of Athens, which survives only in fragments.

What he is remembered for is a method. Procopius set out to explain the Old Testament by gathering, for each passage, what the earlier Christian commentators had said about it, Origen, Basil, Cyril, Theodoret, Diodore, Apollinarius, and others, arranged in sequence under the verse, with the source named. He did it for the Octateuch, for Kings and Chronicles, for Isaiah, for Proverbs, for the Song of Songs, and for Ecclesiastes.

That form is what later scholars named the catena, the chain: a chain of quotations hung on the text. Procopius is generally credited as its inventor, or at least its first great practitioner, and once he had shown how it worked the Byzantine world produced catenae for practically every book of the Bible for the next thousand years.

The value of the chains is not originality. Procopius rarely argues for himself; he selects, condenses, and arranges. The value is preservation. An enormous amount of early Greek exegesis survives only because catena-makers copied it before the full works were lost, much of Origen on the Old Testament, for instance, and fragments of writers condemned by later councils whose books were destroyed. Every modern edition of those fragments is built out of the catenae, and Procopius stands at the head of the tradition.

His own commentaries also survive in a shorter form that he seems to have made himself, an epitome, which reads more like a running exposition. On method he stands between the schools, giving the plain sense first and then the spiritual reading, and he is unusually careful to note where the ancient authorities disagreed.

His pupil Choricius delivered the funeral oration, and it is the main source for his life.

Sources: Procopius of Gaza, Commentary on the Octateuch (Migne, Patrologia Graeca 87) and Epistulae; Choricius of Gaza, Funeral Oration for Procopius; Johannes Quasten, Patrology; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.