In the seven letters at the beginning of the Apocalypse she saw a clear proof of his primatial authority over these seven Asiatic Churches. And so for a time the Bishops of Ephesus as Primates or Exarchs of Asia took the fifth place in the hierarchy (after Jerusalem). Only once did one of them receive a faint shadow of what might have become his dignity. In 475 Timothy the Cat of Alexandria, in order to win the Exarch of Ephesus for his campaign against Chalcedon, affects to give him the dignity of a Patriarch.[1] Cæsarea in Cappadocia was one of the Apostolic Churches. On Whit-Sunday "those who dwell in Cappadocia" heard the Apostles speak their own tongue (Acts ii. 9); St. Peter greets the Elect of the dispersion in Cappadocia (1 Pet. i. 1). And Cæsarea (Mazaca) became a centre from which the Christian faith was propagated. The Church of Armenia was founded, or at any rate reconstituted,[2] by St. Gregory the Illuminator (3rd century), a prince of the Armenian royal house, who had fled to Cæsarea, was converted there, and then went back home to be the apostle of his people. So Cæsarea also had a daughter-Church outside the Empire. Till the middle of the 5th century the Armenian Exarch (the Katholikos) was always ordained by the Exarch of Cæsarea. But the Church of Armenia, in a synod at Valarshapat in 491, rejected the decrees of Chalcedon, and she has ever since remained in schism with Cæsarea and with the Church of the Empire. The Armenian Monophysites could not even arrange a union with their co-religionists the Syrian Jacobites.
Firmilian, the friend of St. Cyprian and the sharer of his mistake about heretic baptism, was Bishop of Cæsarea from 232 to 269. But the greatest names among the bishops of this city are Eusebius (b. 265, Bp. c. 313, † c. 340), the Father of Church History, and, greater still, St. Basil (b. c. 330, Bp. 370, † 379), one of the most famous of all the Greek Fathers. But neither
- ↑ Evagr. H.E. iii. 6, seq. Cf. Duchesne, Églises séparées, p. 168.
- ↑ The Armenian tradition says that four Apostles had brought the faith to this land—SS. Bartholomew, Thaddæus, Simon and Jude. There certainly were Armenian bishops before St. Gregory. Dionysius of Alexandria (248–265) wrote a letter about penance to Meruzan, "Bishop of the Armenians" (Eus. H.E. vi. 46).
