The Apostolic Missionary

The most famous thing ever said of Gregory the Wonderworker is a reversal of numbers: that when he was made bishop of Neocaesarea he found only seventeen Christians in the whole city, and that at his death only seventeen pagans remained. This figure — the emblem of the “wholesale conversion of Pontus” — comes not from Gregory’s own pen but from the Life composed by Gregory of Nyssa about a century after the Wonderworker’s death, and it is pinned to that source here rather than asserted as fact. This file follows the tradition of how Gregory became bishop, the seventeen-to-seventeen schema and its source, the real conversion of Pontus over a generation that historians reconstruct behind it, and the missionary methods Nyssa describes — above all the institution of festivals in honor of the martyrs to draw a pagan people gently toward the faith.

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

The Convert Sent Home

When Gregory left Origen’s school at Caesarea Maritima — probably in the early 240s — he returned to his native Pontus a Christian and a trained philosopher (see The Student of Origen). What the Address of Thanksgiving establishes securely ends roughly there: the genuine, first-person record carries Gregory home and falls silent. Everything that follows about his episcopate — how he was made bishop, what he did as bishop, and the marvels attached to those years — reaches us overwhelmingly through the Life of Gregory the Wonderworker composed by Gregory of Nyssa around 380, fully a century after its subject’s death, and through the briefer notices of Basil of Caesarea, who knew the Pontic tradition through his grandmother Macrina the Elder (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 29; trans. NPNF II/8; on the Life and its distance from events see The Witness of Gregory of Nyssa). The reader is therefore moving, from this point on, out of the territory of Gregory’s own voice and into the territory of later tradition — sober tradition with a real historical core, but tradition all the same, and it is treated as such throughout this file.

According to Nyssa, Gregory at first sought to avoid the burden of the episcopate altogether. Having returned home, he is said to have withdrawn into solitude to escape the very honor that the Church wished to lay on him, much as other reluctant bishops of the age fled ordination (Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Gregory the Wonderworker [PG 46:893–958]; trans. Slusser, FOTC 98). The man who pressed the office upon him, in Nyssa’s account and in the consistent later tradition, was Phaedimus, bishop of Amasea, the metropolitan see of Pontus, who is said to have sought out the unwilling Gregory and consecrated him bishop of Neocaesarea — by one strand of the tradition ordaining him at a distance when Gregory kept eluding him, by a kind of consecration in absence that Nyssa frames as itself providential (Gregory of Nyssa, Life [PG 46:893–958]; trans. Slusser, FOTC 98). The historical kernel here is modest but plausible: that Gregory was drawn into the episcopate of his home city under the metropolitan authority of Amasea, the established church of the province, sometime in the 240s.

It is worth marking at the outset what is firm and what is not. That Gregory was bishop of Neocaesarea is among the securest facts of his life: Eusebius names him as a bishop of distinction in Pontus (Eusebius, HE 6.30; 7.14; 7.28; trans. NPNF II/1), Basil treats his episcopate and his apostolic standing in Pontus as common knowledge (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 29; trans. NPNF II/8), and the genuine Canonical Epistle shows a working bishop governing a Pontic flock in the 250s (see The Canonical Epistle). The manner of his consecration by Phaedimus, the reluctance, the consecration-at-a-distance — these are the gift of Nyssa’s Life and the later tradition, and stand on its authority.

The Seventeen and the Seventeen

The episcopate of Gregory is remembered above all for a single, memorable claim about numbers. Gregory of Nyssa relates that when Gregory was entrusted with the church of Neocaesarea, he found there only seventeen Christians in the whole city; and that through the labor of his episcopate the church grew until, at his death, there remained in Neocaesarea only seventeen pagans — the exact figure now inverted, the small Christian remnant having become the small pagan remnant (Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Gregory the Wonderworker [PG 46:893–958]; trans. Slusser, FOTC 98). The schema is rhetorically perfect: a chiasmus in flesh and blood, the seventeen believers at the beginning answered by the seventeen unbelievers at the end, the whole city turned inside out by the labor of one apostolic bishop. It is the single most quoted detail of Gregory’s life, the emblem of what later writers called the wholesale conversion of Pontus, and it is the reason he stands in Orthodox memory beside the apostles as the evangelizer of a province.

Its source, however, must be named plainly. The seventeen-to-seventeen reversal is not found in Gregory’s own genuine works, nor in Eusebius, nor in Basil. It appears, for the first time in the surviving record, in Gregory of Nyssa’s Life, written about a century after the Wonderworker’s death (Gregory of Nyssa, Life [PG 46:893–958]; trans. Slusser, FOTC 98). Per the repository methodology (§3.5), a hagiographical claim of this kind is pinned to its earliest written attestation and reported as the testimony of that source, never certified as historical fact. The number seventeen, in particular, has the look of a symbolic rather than a counted figure — the kind of exact, memorable, and suspiciously tidy datum that the encomiastic genre delights in — and its perfect inversion (precisely seventeen at each end) is a literary effect before it is a census. What can be said with confidence is that Gregory of Nyssa, drawing on the living Pontic tradition of his own family and church, recorded a memory that the conversion of Neocaesarea under Gregory had been nearly total; the specific arithmetic is Nyssa’s, and the historicity of the exact figure is genuinely disputed.

[Disputed: the historicity of the seventeen-Christians/seventeen-pagans reversal — Gregory of Nyssa's *Life* (c. 380; PG 46:893–958; trans. Slusser, FOTC 98) reports it as a fact of the Wonderworker's episcopate, and it is received in the Orthodox tradition as the emblem of the conversion of Pontus; modern scholarship, however, reads it as a literary and symbolic figure of an encomium composed about a century after the events, not as a census — Van Dam (*Becoming Christian*, 2003) treats the *Life* as a rhetorical construction that dramatizes, in the person of one heroic bishop, a real but slower and more diffuse conversion of the region across a generation, so that the seventeen-to-seventeen schema testifies to the *fact* of a near-total Christianization of Neocaesarea while the exact, inverted number is Nyssa's rhetoric rather than recoverable third-century data. The two positions are not strictly contradictory: the genuine historical claim — that Pontus was substantially converted in and after Gregory's lifetime — survives the deflation of the precise figure.]

The Conversion of Pontus: The History Behind the Tradition

Behind the seventeen-to-seventeen reversal lies a genuine and remarkable historical fact, and it is important not to let source-criticism of the number obscure the reality of the event. By the fourth century, Pontus and Cappadocia were among the most thoroughly Christianized regions of the empire — the homeland of the great Cappadocian Fathers, dense with churches, monasteries, and a Christian gentry — and that Christianization had its decisive beginnings in the third century, in and around the lifetime of Gregory. The deflation of Nyssa’s arithmetic does not touch this: something like a wholesale conversion of the region did in fact occur, and Gregory stood at or near its head.

The most searching modern reconstruction of that process is Raymond Van Dam’s Becoming Christian: The Conversion of Roman Cappadocia (2003), which reads Nyssa’s Life not as a chronicle to be checked fact by fact but as a window onto how a later Christian society remembered and narrated its own conversion. For Van Dam, the conversion of Pontus was not the instantaneous miracle of one man’s preaching that the encomium implies, but a generation-long social transformation — the gradual displacement of the old civic and religious order of the Pontic cities by a new Christian one, carried by households, by local notables, by the slow accumulation of believers, and by the institutions a bishop could build. Gregory’s role in that process was real and probably formative; but the Life compresses a diffuse, decades-long change into the heroic career of a single apostolic figure, because that is what an encomium does and what a fourth-century Christian Pontus needed its founding bishop to have been (Van Dam, Becoming Christian, 2003). On this reading the seventeen-to-seventeen schema is true to the outcome — Neocaesarea did become an overwhelmingly Christian city — while being a rhetorical rather than a statistical account of the road to that outcome.

This is the discipline the present guide adopts: to affirm without hesitation that Pontus was genuinely and substantially converted in the era of Gregory, and that Gregory was a central agent of that conversion, while pinning the specific dramatic claims — the exact seventeen, the speed, the near-magical completeness — to Nyssa’s century-later Life and to the encomiastic memory it preserves. The historical Gregory was an apostle of Pontus; the seventeen-to-seventeen Gregory is the apostle as his great-grandchildren in the faith remembered and celebrated him.

Missionary Methods in Nyssa’s Life

If the Life is read for what it can tell us about how Gregory and his successors actually drew a pagan population toward the Church, one of its most valuable and historically suggestive themes is its account of his missionary method — for here Nyssa preserves a recognizable, real pastoral strategy rather than a mere wonder. Nyssa relates that Gregory, seeing how deeply the people were attached to their pagan festivals — the public feasts, processions, and assemblies that structured the civic and religious year of a Pontic city — did not simply forbid them, but redirected the impulse. He is said to have instituted, in place of the old feasts, festivals and commemorations in honor of the holy martyrs, so that the people might keep their love of gathering, of celebration, of feast-days and public joy, while the object of the celebration was transferred from the gods to the saints of the Church. Nyssa frames this as a deliberate condescension to human weakness: that the crowd, allowed its festal joys now sanctified, would in time be led on from a more bodily devotion to a more spiritual one (Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Gregory the Wonderworker [PG 46:893–958]; trans. Slusser, FOTC 98).

This is a theme of real historical importance, and modern scholarship has taken it seriously precisely because it describes a mechanism of Christianization visible across the late-antique world: the substitution of the cult of the martyrs and saints, with its feasts, shrines, and processions, for the older civic and pagan festal calendar. Van Dam draws on exactly this passage in reconstructing how the conversion of Pontus and Cappadocia actually proceeded — not by the obliteration of the old religious culture but by the transformation of its forms, the martyrs’ shrines inheriting the social and festal functions once served by the temples and the gods (Van Dam, Becoming Christian, 2003). Whether or not Gregory personally and consciously originated the policy, the Life here records a genuine pattern of how a pagan region became Christian; and Nyssa’s report that the founding bishop instituted martyr-festivals to wean the people from pagan feasts is one of the more historically credible elements of the whole work, because it coheres with what we independently know of the process.

Other features of Gregory’s episcopate as Nyssa describes it belong more to the miraculous register and are treated elsewhere in this guide: the building of the church at Neocaesarea, the expulsion of demons from a pagan temple and the conversion of its keeper, the great public signs by which Nyssa says Gregory overawed a pagan population into belief (see The Miracles of Gregory). These the methodology pins firmly to the Life as miracle-accounts. But alongside them, and more soberly, Nyssa preserves the picture of a bishop who built institutions — who gave Neocaesarea a church, a clergy, an ordered worship, and a Christian festal calendar — and it is in that institutional labor, far more than in any single wonder, that the real conversion of Pontus was carried (Gregory of Nyssa, Life [PG 46:893–958]; trans. Slusser, FOTC 98; Van Dam, Becoming Christian, 2003).

The Apostolic Standing of Gregory

The cumulative effect of this missionary career — however its details are weighed — was that Gregory came to be remembered as something close to an apostle: the founder of the Pontic-Cappadocian church, the man from whom the later Christian order of the region traced its descent. Basil of Caesarea, writing in the 370s, appeals to Gregory’s authority precisely as a founding father whose teaching and practice carried apostolic weight in Pontus, and explicitly likens him to the apostles and the prophets in the power of his ministry, invoking the very wonders attributed to him as marks of an apostolic grace (Basil, On the Holy Spirit 29; trans. NPNF II/8). For the Cappadocians, Gregory was not a remote figure but the root of their own tradition, the bishop through whom the faith had come to their land and through whose church their own families had been Christian for generations — a memory transmitted in Basil’s own household through his grandmother Macrina the Elder, who had been catechized in the Pontic tradition that went back to Gregory (Basil, Letter 204; On the Holy Spirit 29; trans. NPNF II/8; on this transmission see The Cult in Pontus and Cappadocia).

It is this apostolic standing, secured by the genuine memory of a real and far-reaching conversion of Pontus, that the seventeen-to-seventeen reversal exists to express. The number is Nyssa’s; the apostolate is history. Gregory went home to a city with a handful of believers and a province full of temples, and within living memory of his death Pontus had become a Christian land. Whether the believers numbered seventeen at the start and the pagans seventeen at the end, no third-century document can tell us; but that the change itself was real, and that Gregory was its apostle, the whole subsequent history of Christian Pontus and Cappadocia bears out (Van Dam, Becoming Christian, 2003; Basil, On the Holy Spirit 29; trans. NPNF II/8). The bishop who built that church then had to lead it through fire — through the empire-wide persecution of Decius and the plague that followed — and it is to that pastoral trial that the next file turns (see The Pastor in Persecution).

References

Gregory of Nyssa. De vita Gregorii Thaumaturgi (On the Life of Gregory the Wonderworker). PG 46:893–958. Trans. in Michael Slusser, St. Gregory Thaumaturgus: Life and Works. Fathers of the Church 98. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998. (The reluctance and the consecration by Phaedimus of Amasea; the seventeen Christians at the start and seventeen pagans at the end of the episcopate; the institution of martyr-festivals in place of the pagan feasts; the building of the Neocaesarean church.)
Eusebius of Caesarea. Ecclesiastical History 6.30; 7.14; 7.28. Trans. Arthur C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 1. 1890. (Gregory/Theodore as a bishop of distinction in Pontus.)
Basil of Caesarea. On the Holy Spirit 29; Letter 204. Trans. in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 8. 1895. (Gregory’s apostolic standing in Pontus; the Pontic tradition transmitted through Macrina the Elder.)
Gregory Thaumaturgus. Canonical Epistle. Trans. S. D. F. Salmond, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 6. Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1886. (The genuine witness to a working bishop governing a Pontic flock in the 250s.)
Van Dam, Raymond. Becoming Christian: The Conversion of Roman Cappadocia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. (The conversion of Pontus and Cappadocia as a generation-long social transformation; the Life of Nyssa as a rhetorical construction dramatizing a real but diffuse Christianization; the substitution of the cult of the martyrs and their festivals for the older pagan festal order.)
Slusser, Michael, trans. St. Gregory Thaumaturgus: Life and Works. Fathers of the Church 98. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998. (Translation and introduction to Nyssa’s Life and Gregory’s genuine works.)