St. Anianus of Alexandria
The Second Bishop of Alexandria
From the tradition of the Alexandrian Church
The cobbler whose hand was healed
Editor's note
The earliest account of Anianus is preserved in the synaxarion of the Alexandrian Church. He was a cobbler in Alexandria, where the Apostle Mark had come from Cyrene to preach the Gospel. As Mark entered the city, the thong of his sandal broke; he went to the nearest workshop, and Anianus, taking the sandal, drove the awl through his own hand. He cried out, the tradition says, in the only name he yet knew that meant 'one God', and Mark, hearing him, took his hand, prayed, and healed it on the spot.
Anianus took Mark into his house, was catechized, and baptized with his whole family. The wonder spread through the quarter, and many of the city were converted in the months that followed. When Mark went on to preach further, the new congregation was left in Anianus's keeping, and when after his last visit Mark was martyred at Pascha in the year sixty-eight, the Church of Alexandria received Anianus as the second to sit on the throne of St. Mark.
He governed the see for some twenty-two years, through the reigns of Vespasian and Titus and into the years of Domitian, until he reposed in peace around the year eighty-six. The continuity of the Coptic and Orthodox Patriarchates of Alexandria traces itself, through every later patriarch, back to him.
Successor of an evangelist
Editor's note
The figure of Anianus is the Church's quiet witness that the work of an apostle is not finished when his book has been written. The Gospel according to Mark would carry Mark's name through every century; Anianus's name is hardly remembered outside Alexandria. But the city in which the Gospel was first preached needed a shepherd to remain when the apostle moved on, and the great patriarchate of the East that produced Athanasius and Cyril rests on the work of an unlettered cobbler whose hand had once been healed.
In him the apostolic succession is shown in its actual character: not a chain of celebrated names, but a passing on of the cure that an apostle had first received from the Lord and that he in turn gave away. The cobbler with the pierced hand became the second bearer of the Alexandrian see, and the Church has not forgotten him.