The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Martyrs' Church
Theonas of Alexandria
died c. 300Early Church
The Alexandrian bishop of the calm years before Diocletian, and the famous letter that turned out not to be his.
Pictured: the era he stood in — The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer — Jean-Léon Gérôme (1863–83), public domain
Summary
- Lived died c. 300.
- Stood in The Martyrs' Church (AD 100–313).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Early Church.
The life
Theonas was bishop of Alexandria from about 282 to 300, following Maximus. His term covered the last long stretch of peace the Egyptian church would have before the Great Persecution, and he handed the see to Peter, who was beheaded for it eleven years later.
What is recorded of his eighteen years is mostly institutional. He is credited with building or dedicating a large church in Alexandria that carried his name for centuries afterward and was still standing when the Arabs took the city. He appointed Pierius, one of the finest scholars of the age, to head the catechetical school. In 295, when the usurper Domitius Domitianus and his general Achilleus held Alexandria against Diocletian and the city was besieged for eight months and then sacked, Theonas is said to have stayed and worked among the people through it.
He is best known, though, for a letter that is almost certainly not his.
The Epistle of Theonas to Lucianus, Chief Chamberlain is a beautiful document. It is addressed to a Christian holding high office in Diocletian's own household, and it tells him how to live honestly there: serve the emperor faithfully because all authority is from God; take no bribes; do not use access for profit; be scrupulous with the imperial accounts; be courteous to petitioners; find time in the day for Scripture.
It describes Christians in the palace in charge of the wardrobe, the treasury, and the imperial library, and it advises a believer to be so good at his job that his religion becomes credible through his work. It was quoted for centuries as a window into Christian life at the top of the Roman state.
It is a forgery. Pierre Batiffol first argued it, and Adolf von Harnack agreed: the letter is almost certainly the work of Jérôme Vignier, a seventeenth-century French scholar who manufactured several ancient documents and whose fabrications were only unmasked long after they entered the standard collections. The letter had been accepted as genuine as early as 1672 and printed in the great patristic series; it appears in the Ante-Nicene Fathers under Theonas's name to this day.
So the record on Theonas is honest and thin. He governed Alexandria for eighteen years, built a church, chose a good teacher, stayed through a siege, and died in 300 with his church intact and about to be tested. The most quoted thing attributed to him was written thirteen hundred years after he died.
Sources: Eusebius, Church History VII.32; the Epistle of Theonas to Lucianus (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 6), with the forgery argument of Pierre Batiffol and Adolf von Harnack; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, article Theonas; Henry Wace, Dictionary of Christian Biography.
What was happening while he lived3 moments · AD 100–313
- 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.
- 257–260Valerian targets the leadershipValerian went after the church's structure rather than the crowd: bishops, priests, and deacons first, then Christians of senatorial and knightly rank, and the cemeteries where they met. Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, was beheaded on September 14, 258; Sixtus II of Rome was seized in a catacomb the same year. When Valerian was captured by the Persians, his son Gallienus reversed the policy in 260, and the church got about forty years of quiet.
- 303–311Eight years of pressure, and the handers-overSome clergy surrendered the Scriptures to be burned to save their people, and were afterward called handers-over, *traditores*, the root of our word traitor. Eusebius, who lived through it, describes executions in Palestine and Egypt in numbers he says he saw with his own eyes. The bitterness over who had held firm would split the North African church in the next era.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Theonas of Alexandria at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Told Christians working inside the emperor's own palace how to stay honest there.
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 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.