Epiphanius of Salamis

Epiphanius of Salamis was a bishop of Constantia (Salamis) on Cyprus, a monastic founder, and one of the most prolific heresiologists of the late fourth century. He was born in the early fourth century at Besanduc, a village near Eleutheropolis in Roman Palestine; the exact year of his birth is not recorded. A later legendary biography asserted that he came from a Jewish family and was converted to Christianity in his youth, but that narrative is of doubtful historical value. Near-contemporary writers such as Sozomen simply place his origins in Palestine. As a young man he adopted the monastic life and spent a substantial period among the monks of Egypt, where he observed both the desert ascetic tradition and a variety of doctrinal currents. He then returned to his native region, founded a monastery near Eleutheropolis, and governed it as abbot for many years, reportedly for some three decades. Ancient testimony credits him with knowledge of several languages, including Greek, Syriac, Hebrew, and Coptic, which later earned him the reputation of a man of five tongues.

In or about 367 he was elected bishop of Salamis, also known as Constantia, the metropolitan see of Cyprus, and he retained that office until his death. He continued to live as a monk while exercising episcopal authority and became known throughout the eastern churches for his zeal against teachings he regarded as heretical. His principal surviving works were composed during his episcopate. The Ancoratus, written around 374, presented a summary of orthodox doctrine and included credal material. Shortly afterward he produced the Panarion, or Medicine Chest, a lengthy refutation of some eighty heresies arranged in a historical sequence from primitive sects to the disputes of his own day. The Panarion remains an important, if frequently hostile and not always accurate, source for the history of early Christian groups, including Jewish-Christian sects, Gnostics, and various post-Nicene parties. Epiphanius treated heresy as a disease requiring diagnosis and antidote, and he showed little patience for allegorical or speculative theology that seemed to him to undermine the plain sense of scripture or the faith of Nicaea.

The last decades of his life were marked by the Origenist controversy. Epiphanius had come to regard many of Origen’s opinions—especially on allegory, the pre-existence of souls, and the resurrection body—as dangerous. In the 390s he visited Palestine and confronted John, bishop of Jerusalem, over the reading of Origen and over suspected Origenism in local monasteries. The quarrel involved Jerome, then at Bethlehem, and Rufinus of Aquileia, and it contributed to the bitter rupture between those two former friends. Epiphanius’s interventions were characteristically blunt: he ordained a priest in John’s diocese without authorization and pressed monks to condemn Origen. In 402 and 403 he was drawn into the related campaign of Theophilus of Alexandria against the Tall Brothers and other Origenist monks, a campaign that Theophilus turned against John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople. Epiphanius traveled to the imperial capital. Ancient accounts differ on how far he cooperated in the attack on Chrysostom; some suggest that he declined to join in condemnation and chose to return home.

He died at sea in 403 while sailing back from Constantinople to Cyprus. His body was conveyed to Salamis and buried there. Veneration of Epiphanius as a saint began early in both the Greek East and the Latin West. His principal feast day is 12 May. Later ecclesiastical tradition honored him as a staunch guardian of orthodoxy, while modern historical study has often noted the limitations of his historical method, the severity of his temperament, and the value of the Panarion as a quarry of otherwise lost information about early Christian sects and controversies.