The Greek Life of Porphyrios (bishop of Gaza, ob. 420, S01368), attributed to Mark the Deacon, is written, telling how pagan Gaza was converted to Christianity and how the great temple of Marnas was destroyed and replaced by a church. Written probably in Gaza, in the 2nd half of the 5th c., or first half of the 6th.
E08566
Literary - Hagiographical - Lives
Mark the Deacon, Life of Porphyrios of Gaza (CPG 6722; BHG 1570)
Summary
1-3. The author [Mark], who says he has lived with Porphyrios for a long time, explains in a Preface [that draws very heavily on Theodoret of Cyrrhus’ Religious History] that he is writing in order to preserve the memory of the holy man.
4-9. Porphyrios, from an illustrious and wealthy family of Thessalonica, leaves his home city for Egypt and spends five years as a monk at Scetis, and then another five years in the Holy Land, living in a cave near the Jordan. Taken ill, he moves to Jerusalem, where the author [Mark] becomes his follower, and is sent by Porphyrios to Thessalonica to sell up the latter’s inheritance. On Mark’s return, he finds Porphyrios miraculously cured. The latter charitably distributes all the wealth Mark has brought from Thessalonica.
10. Porphyrios, now aged about 45, is ordained priest and made custodian of the relic of the Holy Cross.
11-18. Three years later, he is chosen to be bishop of Gaza by John, metropolitan bishop of Caesarea, and he travels to Gaza by way of Caesarea, accompanied by Mark and another follower, named Barochas.
19-21. Arriving in Gaza, Porphyrios succeeds in ending a drought that the pagans of the city, invoking the god Marnas, had failed to do, by leading his Christian flock in supplication to two churches outside the city, one of which is dedicated to the Gazan martyr Timotheos [S00122] and also holds the relics of two further saints: Maior [martyr of Gaza, S03093] and Theē [confessor of Gaza, S03099] – see E08573.
22-25. Porphyrios has to intervene in order to save Barochas from a hostile crowd, after he had been badly beaten up by pagans.
26-27. Porphyrios sends Mark to Constantinople, where, with the help of Bishop John [Chrysostom], he obtains imperial orders that Marnas’ shrine, the Marneion, be closed. Returning to Gaza, this happens, though, through corruption of the official responsible, pagan worship and oracular pronouncements continue in secret.
28-31. Ailia/Aelia, a prominent pagan of Gaza, is saved from death in childbirth by Porphyrios. This brings about the conversion of all in her family.
32-36. Faced with continued pagan opposition in Gaza, Porphyrios, accompanied by Bishop John of Caesarea and by Mark, sails for Constantinople. En route, on Rhodes they visit a holy man named Prokopios [who is otherwise unknown], who tells them to approach the emperor by way of the Empress Eudoxia, and to gain her favour by assuring her that, if she can offer them help, the child she is expecting will be a boy.
37-40. Arriving in Constantinople, and aided by John Chrysostom and the cubicularius Amantios, Porphyrios and his companions gain an audience with Eudoxia, who promises to help them.
41-43. The emperor [Arcadius], unwilling to endanger the tax revenues of Gaza, does not immediately accede to Eudoxia’s wishes, but – assured that her child will be a boy – she decides to persevere.
44-49. Eudoxia gives birth to a son, who is named Theodosius, and, by a trick orchestrated by Eudoxia, the infant on the day of his baptism is made to grant Porphyrios’ petition: the attendant holding the baby receives Porphyrios’ petition, and, with his hand under its head, makes the child nod its assent to it. The emperor Arcadius reluctantly acquiesces in the decision of his son and co-emperor.
50-51. Eudoxia has an imperial rescript drawn up, ordering the destruction of the temples in Gaza, and procures the appointment of a devout Christian, Kynegios/Cynegius, to ensure it is enforced.
52-54. After wintering in the city, Porphyrios and Bishop John of Caesarea take their leave of the empress and emperor, who grant them handsome gifts – the former giving and promising the necessary funds to build a new church in the centre of Gaza.
55-57. At sea, they are saved from destruction in a terrible storm by the intervention in a dream of the hermit Prokopios of Rhodes, who advises that the danger will only be averted if the captain renounces his Arian beliefs.
58-62. They arrive at Maiuma (the port of Gaza), and then, on entering the city, an image of Aphrodite is miraculously cast down, leading many pagans to convert.
63-65. On the arrival of Kynegios, ten days later, the temples of the city, with their treasures, are all seized, though its priests attempt to save the Marneion by barricading it.
66-71. There is a discussion about what to do with the Marneion. Eventually – miraculously instructed through the words of a child – it is decided to burn it down and to build a church on the site.
72-74. On the burning of the Marneion, many pagans convert and are welcomed into the Christian flock by Porphyrios.
75-80. With suitable prayers and piety, and led by Porphyrios, the building of the church on the site of the destroyed and demolished Marneion is begun, funded by the empress Eudoxia.
81-83. During the work, three children fall into a well on the site; but, following prayerful intercession by Porphyrios, are found safe and well.
84. The following year, 32 marble columns for the church, sent by Eudoxia, arrive.
85-91. A Manichaean woman from Antioch named Ioulia disputes with Porphyrios. The latter says that God will silence her, and she is struck first dumb, and then dead. Her followers all renounce their error.
92-93. After five years of work, the great church is completed and named the ‘Eudoxiana’ after its patron the empress.
94. Porphyrios’ charitable donations are described.
95-98. The pagans of the city foment further violent disorder. Porphyrios is compelled to seek safety by fleeing across the roof-tops, and is offered humble shelter by a poor young girl named Salaphtha, who is pagan but desires to become a Christian.
99-102. Order is restored by the governor, and the troublemakers punished – some with the sword, others with the whip. Porphyrios summons Salaphtha, baptises her and her close relatives, and provides for their physical needs. Salaphtha chooses, and lives out, a life of chastity and asceticism.
103. In a very brief final chapter, the author records that Porphyrios lived for a few years after the consecration and then died, having set the affairs of the Gazan church in order, in the year 480 of the city’s calendar [= AD 420], and having served as bishop for 24 years, 11 months and 8 days. ‘Now he is in the paradise of delight, interceding with all the saints on our behalf, through whose prayers may God the Father, together with the Son and the Holy Spirit, have mercy on us, to whom be praise and power from eternity to eternity. Amen.’ (Καὶ νῦν ἔστιν ἐν τῷ παραδείσῳ τῆς τρυφῆς, πρεσβεύων μετὰ πάντων τῶν ἁγίων ὑπὲρ ἡμῶν, ὧν ταῖς εὐχαῖς ἐλεήσῃ ἡμᾶς ὁ πατὴρ καὶ Θεὸς σὺν υἱῷ καὶ Ἁγίῳ Πνεύματι, ᾧ ἡ δόξα καὶ τὸ κράτος εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας τῶν αἰώνων. Ἀμήν.)
Text: Lampadaridi 2016, 74-186.
Summary: A. Lampadaridi, B. Ward-Perkins
Procession
Cult PlacesCult building - independent (church)
MiraclesMiracle during lifetime
Miracles causing conversion
Healing diseases and disabilities
Fertility- and family-related miracles (infertility, marriages)
Power over elements (fire, earthquakes, floods, weather)
Apparition, vision, dream, revelation
Miraculous protection - of people and their property
Miraculous protection - of communities, towns, armies
RelicsUnspecified relic
Protagonists in Cult and NarrativesWomen
Children
Ecclesiastics - bishops
Pagans
Monarchs and their family
Officials
Source
The Life of Porphyrios of Gaza is known through seven manuscripts, three of them with the complete text (two of which are datable to the tenth century): https://pinakes.irht.cnrs.fr/notices/oeuvre/13416/ . The manuscript tradition is analysed by Lampadaridi 2016, 38-49.The author of the Life purports to be Mark the Deacon, a figure unknown from any other source. He introduces himself early in the text as the saint’s loyal disciple, narrating his master’s life. Mark tells us that he was a manuscript scribe (kalligraphos) who had come to the Holy Land from Asia in order to visit the sacred sites. and he presents himself as almost at the same age as Porphyrios, who always addresses him as ‘my brother’ (and never ‘my child’).
The Life is explicit that it was written after the saint’s death in 420 (when aged into his 70s), but its presentation of its author as a devout immediate contemporary of Porphyrios is tarnished, because of its heavy use (to the point of plagiarism) of a text dating from 443/444, almost 25 years after Porphyrios’ death: the Religious History of Theodoret of Cyrrhus (Grégoire and Kugener 1930, xlv-lxxvi). In fact the use of Theodoret’s History by the writer of the Life is wider even than Grégoire and Kugener showed – it concerns the whole text and is not limited to its prologue. Mark therefore cannot be the author of the Life, but only its narrator.
As a narrator, Mark does not only portray his common life with Porphyrios but also describes several scenes in which he is not supposed to have been present: in the chapters 32-33, Mark gives a detailed account of the encounter between Porphyrios and the bishop John in Caesarea, when he (Mark) was supposedly still in Gaza (ch. 34); during Porphyrios’s mission in the capital, he recounts many episodes in which he could not have assisted: the third and the fourth audience that Eudoxia granted the prelates (ch. 39, 40, 43, 50), the encounters between Eudoxia and Arcadius (ch. 41) as well as Kynegius (51), and finally the scene between the prelates and the emperor (54). The narrator knows more than he is supposed to be able to know. All in all, hiding behind the figure of Porphyrius’ faithful companion, there is an individual who knows much more than the devout servant to whom the Life is attributed – we pass from the limited knowledge of a first-person narrator to the unlimited knowledge of a third-person narrator. There is a discrepancy, a gap between the writer and the author, which functions as a signal to the reader, meaning that we should be aware of what is told. The existence of such a narrator stems from a particular literary model, a topos, according to which disciples are often the writers of their master’s life. This model offers a comfortable literary frame, a fiction, behind which the real writer can erase his traces. As we will see, this is important in the case of the Life, as the text focuses on the christianisation of the city of Gaza, an aspect of the history of the city that late antique historians passed over in silence.
The shady writer’s figure brings us to another obscure point of the Life of Porphyrius: its equivocal date of composition. This question, closely related to the historicity of Mark’s account, gave rise to controversy as early as the middle of the 16th century, when a Latin translation of the Life was integrated in Lippomani’s Vitae sanctorum. Mark’s narrative caused a lot of ink to flow among scholars like Baronius, Blondel and Le Nain de Tillemont, who pointed out various historical discrepancies that stain the Life’s value as an historical document. Grégoire and Kugener (1930) were, however, the first to point out the dependence of the Life on Theodoret’s Religious History, so the first to determine the year 443/444 as a terminus post quem for its composition (they assumed that the current Life was the result of a later revision of an earlier narrative. Their hypothesis of a ‘historical novel’ (roman historique) that contains traces of a ‘historical nucleus’ (noyau historique) has left a deep mark in later research.
The use of the Life by a 6th-century writer, Cyril of Scythopolis, allows us to determine a terminus ante quem for its composition, the middle of the 6th century. When we look into borrowing between the Life of Porphyrius and Cyril’s Lives of Euthymios and Sabas, the direction of this borrowing is revealed by the use (or non-use) of the term stavrophylax (‘Guardian of the Cross’). The relic of the Holy Cross, kept in the church of the Anastasis, is entrusted to Porphyrius in 392 (ch. 10). His biographer lingers over this office but never mentions this official denomination, as if the term did not yet exist. Whereas, in the works of Cyril of Scythopolis, we come across many figures named as stavrophylakes: it is reasonable to conclude that, if the author of the Life of Porphyrius had read Cyril’s works, he would have used this term. In sum, the Life must have been composed after 444 and before the middle of the 6th century (556/558).
Discussion
The text allows us to partially reconstruct the chronology of Porphyrios’ life on the basis of the only date clearly mentioned in the text, his death on 26 February of the year 420. We also learn that Porphyrios was ordained priest at the age of 45 (ch. 10), and became bishop of Gaza three years later (ch. 16), a post that he held for almost 25 years. We can therefore conclude that Porphyrios was born around 347 and died at the age of around 73. Two Latin texts (Jerome, Letter 92 and Augustine, Contra Iulianum Pelagianum, I,.32) actually mention a Palestinian bishop named Porphyrios alive in around 400 and 415, which lends support to the protagonist of our text as not a wholly fictitious character.In order to understand the function of this text, it is necessary to present some background about the city of Gaza at the time of Porphyrios’ arrival. Mark gives a unique picture of the level of christianisation in the city. Gaza was still largely pagan at the end of the 4th century and the Christian congregation was only a small minority: Mark reports only 280 Christians, women and children included (ch. 19), at a time when the city’s population has been estimated at 20,000 inhabitants. Buildings used for the Christian cult were also very few. One finds the ancient church founded by Bishop Asclepas between 320 and 325, situated in the west of the city (ch. 20). Also, there was extra muros, a martyrium, the holy shrine of the martyr Timotheos, where the relics of two other local martyrs also reposed (ch. 20). Finally, the church named ‘Irene’, meaning ‘peace’ in Greek, was located within the agglomeration. Its construction, together with the bishop’s palace, was attributed to Irenion, bishop between around 360 and 380 (ch. 18). It is therefore important to point out that Gaza possessed only one Christian building intra muros at the end of the 4th century. This indicates that Christian presence in the city within the urban space was at the very least discreet, perhaps almost imperceptible.
On the other hand, Mark counts eight polytheist temples intra muros, among them the famous Marneion, dedicated to the God Marnas, who has been identified with Zeus (ch. 64). Gaza’s urban space was clearly dominated by pagans, which explains the unfriendly welcome that the natives reserved for their new bishop at the very end of the 4th century (ch. 17).
By contrast, Maiuma, Gaza’s harbour, was very Christian from an early date: according to the 5th-century historian Sozomen, the emperor Constantine marked this fact by raising it to city status (thereby giving it independence from Gaza), by renaming it ‘Constantia’, and by granting it its own bishopric. By the time of Porphyrios, independent city-status had lapsed, but Maiuma retained its own bishop, with the result that, very exceptionally, the conurbation of Gaza-Maiuma had two bishops, not always in harmony with each other. The author of Porphyrios’ Life is notably silent about Maiuma’s distinguished Christian heritage, confining himself to the observation that in the Christian crowd that greeted the bishop on his return from Constantinople, people from Maiuma were more numerous than those from Gaza, while attributing this to the presence of many Egyptian wine-merchants in Maiuma (ch. 58). The author’s silence makes sense in the context of the rivalry between the two sees and constitutes part of the context for Mark’s narrative.
The variation of speed within the narrative makes it clear that the periods of the life of Porphyios are not equally treated: his stay in the desert and in Jerusalem are briefly summarised (ch.4), and the first 45 years of his life, preceding his priesthood, are described in only seven chapters (ch.4-10). The narrative is then subjected to a significant deceleration with the mission of the prelates to Constantinople: a period of two years occupies eighteen chapters (37-54). The seven last months of the year 402 then absorb twenty-six chapters (58-83), with the demolition of the temple of Marnas and the construction of the Christian church covering twenty-five (69-93). All these chapters are full of digressions and pauses, which reinforce the feeling of slowness. By contrast, the narrative presents a notorious ellipsis: we learn nothing about Porphyrios’ last years; the text reaches its end abruptly, wrapped up in a curious silence around the circumstances of the saint’s death and the last years of his life.
All this shows that the author did not mean to compose a conventional Life, in other words Porphyrios’ biography: the discrepancies mentioned above demonstrate that the narrative’s structure is far from being considered that of a conventional Life. The narrator clearly slows up when it comes to the Marneion’s demolition and the building of the Christian church on the same spot. This episode occupies the central part of the narrative; one third of the text is dedicated to it, although it represents a period of no longer than five years at the very beginning of the 5th century. Here we touch upon the heart of the text, its nucleus, in other words its raison d’être. After the inauguration of the church and the triumph of Christianity (ch. 92), Mark, the narrator, dashes off the end of the narrative, no longer caring about Porphyrios: the latter has accomplished his mission and must therefore disappear from the scene. Quite unlike other contemporary Lives, no details are given of Porphyrios’ pious death, and there is no mention of miracles at his funeral and at this tomb – indeed, we are not even told where his body rested.
The macro-structure of the text allows us to revisit its function. Its centre of interest is clearly the demolition of Gaza’s major pagan sanctuary and the construction of a Christian church at the centre of the city. Jerome establishes a parallelism between the Marneion of Gaza and the Serapeion of Alexandria, which both gave place to Christian churches (Letter 102; In Isaiam VII.17). But Jerome’s allusions are not sufficient to prove the historicity of the episode narrated in the Life. However, Mark’s description is highly plausible for the beginning of the 5th century: the Marneion is razed to the ground and a Christian church is constructed on the site, which implies no direct conversion of the previous building to a church but rather the use of spolia of the ancient temple to build a new church. We can parallel Eusebius of Caesarea’s description of the demolition of the temple of Aphrodite, prior to Constantine’s church at Golgotha. The association of such an episode to the activity of a bishop is also quite credible, if we think of the cases of Marcellus of Apamea or Aurelius of Carthage. As far as the name of the new-built church is concerned, it was a choice that glorified the memory of the empress Eudoxia but also stressed Porphyrios’ prestigious contacts with the imperial court. Did this church ever exist, and is it currently buried under later constructions? All we can say is that Mark’s narrative offers a possible scenario for a well-known historical fact, the destruction of the Marneion. The text is written in memory of a Christian triumph and a Christian monument, offering a colourful description of the transformation of sacred space.
The composition of such a narrative stemmed from a need to demonstrate that Gaza, which had always been a polytheistic city for official history, also had a Christian face. The construction of a Christian building in the heart of the city symbolised the victory of the Christian religion, which found its way to the very centre of what was considered to be one of the major polytheist fortresses. Beyond the construction of the church, the existence of the Life proves that there was a need to produce a narrative on this transformation and thus keep a record of it. The construction of the church set the seal on the triumph of Christianity and the composition of a narrative of this episode crystallised this conversion, by creating and entertaining a collective (even constructed) memory and imagery based on this monument. This need is not irrelevant to the tension between the pagan city of Gaza and Maiuma with its important Christian community. Mark’s narrative appears in the form of the Life of a holy bishop, as this offered a convenient framework, a canvas, which guaranteed that the text would circulate and would be integrated in collections such as menologia, and thus would be read. In the Life of Porphyrios, the conversion of the city of Gaza to Christianity is perceived basically as a conversion of sacred space: the construction of the church radically changed the urban landscape and the identity of the city – the image of strangers flocking to the newly built Christian monument is striking (ch. 92), whereas the conversion of the local population to Christianity was not so spectacular (ch. 93) and thus unable to encapsulate the image of a Christian city.
Although the Life, with its complete absence of posthumous miracles, was certainly not written to promote Porphyrios’ cult, it did in fact achieve this. Porphyrios features in the most ancient strata of the Synaxarion of Constantinople, the Synaxarion promoted by Constantine Porphyrogenitus in the tenth century (Lampadaridi 2011, 241-246). Indeed it is worth noting that, even if the existence of the Eudoxiana is a highly debated issue, the cult of Saint Porphyrios still persists today amongst the small Christian community of Gaza, not on the site of the Marneion but in the 12th-century Orthodox church of Saint Porphyrios. Located in the north of the Gaza strip, in the Old City quarter, this church was struck by two Israeli missiles in 2024, narrowly escaping destruction. Whether it, its community, and the local cult of Porphyrios can survive the current war is, sadly, an open question.
Bibliography
Editions:Grégoire, H. and Kugener, M.A., Marc le Diacre. Vie de Porphyre, évêque de Gaza. Texte établi, traduit et commenté (=Collection byzantine) (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1930). (Critical Edition and French translation).
Lampadaridi A., La conversion de Gaza au christianisme. La Vie de S. Porphyre par Marc le Diacre (BHG 1570). Édition critique, traduction commentaire (Subsidia Hagiographica 95) (Brussels: Société des Bollandistes, 2016). (Critical Edition and French translation)
Translations:
Carta, C., Vita di san Porfirio, scritta di Marco diacono (= Quaderni della Terra Santa) (Jerusalem: Franciscan Printing Press, 1971), 6-90 (Italian translation).
Childers, J., Rapp, C., Whitby M., Mark the Deacon: The Life of Porphyry of Gaza: Translated with Introduction and Notes, with a translation of the Georgian Life (Translated Texts for Historians 88) (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2025) (English translation) (forthcoming).
Hill, G.H, The Life of Porphyry, Bishop of Gaza, by Mark the Deacon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913) (English translation).
Hübner, A., Marcus diaconus. Vita sancti Porphyrii. Leben des heiligen Porphyrius (=Fontes christiani 53) (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder Verlag, 2013) (German translation).
Katsaros, V., Βίος Ἀγίου Πορφυρίου ἐπισκόπου Γάζης (= Βυζαντινοὶ Συγγραφεῖς 2) (Thessalonica: Zetros, 2003). (Modern Greek translation).
Teja, R., Vida de Porfirio de Gaza. Marco el Diacono. Introduccion, traduccion et notas. (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 2008) (Spanish translation).
Further reading:
Barnes T.D., Early Christian Hagiography and Roman History (Tria Corda. Jenaer Vorlesungen zu Judentum, Antike und Christentum 5) (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010).
Sfameni Gasparro, G., “Porfirio di Gaza, un « uomo santo » fra pagani, eretici et maghi: modelli retorici di propaganda religiosa e realta storica,” in Monaca M. (ed.), Problemi di storia religiosa del mondo tardo-antico. Tra mantica e magia (= Hiera. Collana di studi storico-religiosi 14) (Cosenza : Edizioni Lionello Giordano, 2009), 201-329.
Teja R., “La Vida de Porfirio de Gaza de Marco el Diacono : Hagiografia historica o invencion hagiografica?,” in Blaudeau P. and Van Nuffelen P. (eds), L’historiographie tardo-antique et la transmission des savoirs (Millenium Studien – Millenium Studies 55) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 145-152.
Van Dam, R., “From Paganism to Christianity in Late Antique Gaza,” Viator 16 (1985), 1-20.
Anna Lampadaridi
17/01/2025
| ID | Name | Name in Source | Identity | S00122 | Timotheos, martyr of Gaza | Τιμόθεος | Certain | S01368 | Porphyrios, bishop of Gaza, ob. 420 | Πορφύριος | Certain | S03093 | Maior, martyr of Gaza | Μαΐουρ | Certain | S03099 | Thee, confessor of Gaza | Θέη | Certain |
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