Narcissus

Saint Narcissus was bishop of Jerusalem in the late second and early third centuries. Almost all that can be said of him with historical confidence derives from Eusebius of Caesarea, who treats Narcissus in the fifth and sixth books of the Ecclesiastical History. Eusebius lists him as the thirtieth bishop of Jerusalem after the apostles, in the Gentile succession that followed the earlier Jewish-Christian bishops of that church. His ministry therefore belongs to the period after the Bar Kokhba revolt, when the city, refounded as Aelia Capitolina, had a Gentile Christian community distinct from the first-century church of James. No contemporary source records the year of his birth or of his death. A letter of his coadjutor Alexander, quoted by Eusebius, states that Narcissus had already completed one hundred and sixteen years of age while still sharing in the prayers of the Jerusalem church; later writers have sometimes inferred approximate dates from that remark, but the inference is not a primary record of birth or death.

Eusebius recounts that, during Narcissus's episcopate, the oil for the lamps failed at the great vigil of Pascha. Narcissus ordered water to be drawn from a nearby well, prayed over it, and the water was used as oil; a remnant of it was said to have been kept as a memorial into Eusebius's own time. Despite this reputation, Narcissus was the object of a serious accusation by certain members of the community. Unwilling to remain under the charge, and already drawn to a retired and philosophical life, he withdrew from the city into the wilderness and vanished so completely that his whereabouts were unknown. Eusebius reports that the accusers afterwards suffered conspicuous calamities, which the faithful interpreted as a judgment in the bishop's favor.

In the interval the church of Jerusalem appointed other bishops: Dius, then Germanion, then Gordius. While Gordius was still in office, Narcissus returned and was restored to the episcopate, the people receiving him as if he had come back from the dead. Because of his extreme age, Alexander, a native of Cappadocia who was already a bishop and who had come to Jerusalem on pilgrimage, was associated with him as coadjutor. Eusebius says that the appointment followed a revelation in a night vision to the most distinguished of the Jerusalem faithful, instructing them to detain Alexander. Writing afterwards to the church of Antinoë, Alexander mentioned that Narcissus still lived, joined him in prayer, and had reached the age of one hundred and sixteen. The arrangement illustrates the still informal character of the Palestinian hierarchy in the early third century, when Jerusalem, though apostolic in prestige, was not yet a patriarchal see and stood in a complicated relation to the metropolitan at Caesarea.

Narcissus is commemorated as a saint in both East and West. The Roman Martyrology keeps his feast on 29 October and praises his holiness, patience, and faith. Some Eastern calendars remember him on 7 August. He was never Bishop of Rome, and the title of patriarch of Jerusalem did not exist in his lifetime; that dignity was conferred on the see only in the fifth century. Nothing reliable is known of his birthplace, family, marriage, or burial. He is not associated in the early sources with a religious order in the later monastic sense, though his temporary flight into the desert belongs to the same world of ascetic withdrawal that would soon produce organized monasticism. His historical significance rests on Eusebius's comparatively detailed portrait—miracle, calumny, eremitical disappearance, return, and collaboration with Alexander—which makes him one of the better-attested bishops of third-century Jerusalem.