Pontus in the Third Century

Gregory the Wonderworker was born around 213 into a wealthy pagan family of Neocaesarea, the chief city of Pontus on the river Lycus, in a province that was thoroughly Hellenized in its cities but still overwhelmingly pagan in its religion. This file establishes the land, the city, and the pre-Nicene Church of the third century — its persecutions, its theology, and its missionary frontier — as the world into which Gregory was born and to which he would return as bishop, so that the later tradition of his “wholesale conversion” of Pontus can be read against the actual religious geography of the region.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Ante-Nicene Father; Wonderworker)

The Land of Pontus

Pontus was the broad region along the southern shore of the Black Sea (the Euxine), in the north-east of Asia Minor, in what is now north-central Turkey. In the Hellenistic age it had been the heart of the kingdom of Mithridates VI, Rome’s most formidable eastern enemy; after his defeat by Pompey in the first century before Christ the region was absorbed into the Roman provincial system, its coast and river valleys organized around a string of cities on the Greek model while its mountainous interior remained more remote from Greco-Roman urban culture (Van Dam 2003, ch. 1, on the geography and Hellenization of Pontus and Cappadocia). It is the same Pontus named in the New Testament among the lands from which Jewish pilgrims had come to Jerusalem at Pentecost (Acts 2:9), and in the address of the First Epistle of Peter to “the elect exiles of the dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia” (1 Peter 1:1) — a notice that places a Christian presence, however thin, in the region from the apostolic generation onward.

The most famous early-second-century witness to Christianity in this corner of the empire is not Christian at all. Around 112, Pliny the Younger, governing the neighbouring province of Bithynia-Pontus, wrote to the emperor Trajan for guidance on how to deal with the Christians who were being brought before him — describing a faith that had spread “not only through the cities but also through the villages and rural districts,” with pagan temples nearly deserted and the sacrificial trade collapsed, until his prosecutions began to reverse the trend (Pliny, Letters 10.96; trans. in standard editions). Pliny’s letter, written from the very region that would later be Gregory’s, shows both that Christianity had reached Pontus-Bithynia early and that it remained, in the eyes of the Roman governing class, a foreign and punishable superstition. A century later, when Gregory was born, the cities of Pontus were still predominantly pagan in their public religion.

The City of Neocaesarea

Gregory’s city was Neocaesarea, the metropolis (chief city) of Pontus Polemoniacus, situated in the valley of the river Lycus — a tributary system of the larger river network draining toward the Black Sea (the modern Niksar, in Tokat Province, Turkey). It was a Hellenized city of some importance, the kind of provincial centre that boasted the temples, the civic cults, and the rhetorical schooling of the wider Greek east. Gregory of Nyssa’s Life, written a century later, would make much of the city’s paganism, presenting Gregory’s episcopate as the conversion of a city given over to idols; whatever the exaggeration of the wonder-tradition, the underlying picture of a largely pagan provincial metropolis is consistent with what is known of third-century Pontus (Gregory of Nyssa, De vita Gregorii Thaumaturgi, PG 46; trans. Slusser 1998; Van Dam 2003, ch. 1).

Into this city, around the year 213, Gregory was born — though not under that name. His baptismal or given name was Theodore (“gift of God”), and it is as “Theodore” that the contemporary-near witness Eusebius knows him (Eusebius, HE 6.30; trans. NPNF II/1). The name “Gregory” — meaning “watchful” — he took at some later point, perhaps at baptism or at his consecration as bishop; by the time of the Cappadocian Fathers, a century on, “Gregory the Wonderworker” was the name under which the whole tradition remembered him. His family was wealthy and pagan, and he was raised, as he himself relates, for a career in law and rhetoric — the ordinary upward path of a well-born young man of the Greek-speaking provinces (Gregory Thaumaturgus, Address of Thanksgiving to Origen 5; trans. ANF 6; Slusser 1998).

The Pre-Nicene Church of the Third Century

The Church into which Gregory was born and which he would serve as bishop was the Church of the third century — a distinct moment in Christian history, between the sub-apostolic age of the Apostolic Fathers and the imperial Church of the fourth century. Several features of that world bear directly on Gregory’s story.

First, it was an age of intermittent but severe persecution. Christianity was not legal; it existed at the sufferance of magistrates and the temper of mobs, and across the third century the empire mounted the first systematic, empire-wide attempts to suppress it. The persecution of Decius (250–251) required all inhabitants of the empire to sacrifice to the gods and obtain a certificate (libellus) attesting that they had done so; the persecution of Valerian (257–260) targeted the clergy and the Church’s property and assemblies. Gregory’s episcopate fell squarely across the Decian persecution, and his pastoral response to it — the flight of the faithful, the problem of the lapsed — belongs to the central drama of the mid-third-century Church (see The Pastor in Persecution; on the period, The Pre-Schism Church).

Second, it was the age in which Christian theology came of age as a learned discipline, above all in the catechetical tradition of Alexandria and in the towering figure of Origen, whose school at Caesarea Maritima Gregory would attend. The third century is the century of Origen and of Cyprian of Carthage, of the great questions of the rule of faith, the canon, the discipline of penance, and the relation of Christian truth to Greek philosophy — questions that run directly through Gregory’s own writings, from the Address with its account of a philosophical-Christian education to the Canonical Epistle with its careful penitential discipline (see The Student of Origen; The Canonical Epistle).

Third, it was an age of Trinitarian theology still in formation, decades before the Council of Nicaea (325) would fix the language of the Son’s consubstantiality with the Father. Third-century writers spoke of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with a vocabulary that had not yet been disciplined by the fourth-century controversies; their formulations can sound, to ears trained on the Nicene and Constantinopolitan creeds, either strikingly orthodox or unsettlingly imprecise. Gregory’s Creed is one of the most remarkable documents of exactly this moment — a fully Trinitarian confession composed a lifetime before Nicaea — and it must be read against this pre-Nicene horizon (see The Trinitarian Creed; An Early Trinitarian Witness; on the doctrine, The Holy Trinity).

Fourth, it was an age of active mission on the frontier. The conversion of the Greco-Roman world was still in progress, city by city and region by region, and Pontus was very much a frontier in this sense — a region with an old but thin Christian presence, surrounded by a vigorous pagan civic religion and, beyond the imperial border, by the peoples of the steppe. The later tradition that Gregory found Neocaesarea almost wholly pagan and left it almost wholly Christian, however much it owes to hagiographic enthusiasm, reflects a genuine historical reality: the third century in Pontus was a time and place where a missionary bishop could see the religious complexion of a region change within a lifetime (Van Dam 2003, ch. 1; see The Apostolic Missionary).

The Gothic Threat

One further feature of third-century Pontus must be named, because it shaped one of Gregory’s most important genuine works. The middle of the century saw the great crisis of the Roman frontier — the period sometimes called the “crisis of the third century” — in which barbarian peoples broke repeatedly across the imperial borders. In the 250s the Goths and allied peoples (the Borani) raided across the Black Sea into Pontus and Bithynia, sacking cities, carrying off captives and plunder, and throwing the provincial society of the region into chaos. These raids fell directly upon Gregory’s Pontus, and their moral aftermath — Christians who had collaborated with the raiders, profited from the disorder, or seized the property of their neighbours under cover of the invasion — is the precise occasion of his Canonical Epistle, the most securely datable document of his episcopate (see The Canonical Epistle). The Gothic raids thus anchor Gregory firmly in the political history of the mid-third century: he was a bishop of the crisis years, governing a frontier province through invasion, persecution, and plague.

What Can Be Said

The securely historical frame, then, is this. Gregory was born around 213 into a wealthy pagan family of Neocaesarea in Pontus, under the given name Theodore; his world was the Hellenized but largely pagan provincial society of third-century Asia Minor, on a Christian missionary frontier, in an age of intermittent persecution, formative theology, and barbarian crisis. The richer, more wonderful Gregory — the missionary who converted a city, the bishop who moved a mountain, the visionary who received a creed from the Mother of God — belongs to the later tradition and especially to Gregory of Nyssa’s Life, and is weighed in its own place (see The Witness of Gregory of Nyssa; The Life and the Legend). The foundation, however, is firm: a real young pagan of a real Pontic city, who would leave us his own account of how he became a Christian.

References

Gregory Thaumaturgus. Address of Thanksgiving to Origen. Trans. S. D. F. Salmond, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 6. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1886. (The pagan upbringing and legal education at §5.)
Slusser, Michael, trans. St. Gregory Thaumaturgus: Life and Works. Fathers of the Church 98. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998.
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History 6.30. Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. 1890. (Names “Theodore” and his brother Athenodore as students of Origen.)
Pliny the Younger. Letters 10.96 (to Trajan, on the Christians of Bithynia-Pontus, c. 112).
Van Dam, Raymond. Becoming Christian: The Conversion of Roman Cappadocia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. (The geography, Hellenization, and religious complexion of Pontus and Cappadocia.)
Gregory of Nyssa. De vita Gregorii Thaumaturgi. PG 46:893–958. Trans. in Slusser, St. Gregory Thaumaturgus (1998). (The portrait of pagan Neocaesarea.)