The rhetor of Carthage The Bishop of Carthage
Editor's note
Almost everything known about Cyprian's early life is known because he became famous later and someone who loved him wrote it down. Pontius was Cyprian's deacon, followed him into exile, and outlived him. His Life is the earliest surviving Christian biography of a bishop, and it is frank about how little it knows of the years before the baptism, because, as Pontius saw it, a man's life properly begins when he is born of water and the Spirit.
Thascius Caecilius Cyprianus was born at Carthage, in Roman Africa, around the year two hundred and ten, into wealth and standing. He was educated in rhetoric and taught it publicly, which in that city and that century meant he was one of the men whose voice shaped what the educated classes thought. He owned gardens, he kept a household, and he was, by his own later account, comfortable, admired, and unfree.
In middle life he came to know an old presbyter named Caecilianus, who taught him the Scriptures. What broke in him he described afterward in the letter to Donatus: that he had thought the new birth impossible, that a man so long formed by his habits could not be remade, and that he had been wrong. He was baptized around the year two hundred and forty six.
The change was not private. He sold his gardens and gave the price to the poor of Carthage, took a vow of continence, and put the pagan authors away for the Scriptures and for Tertullian, whom he read daily and called, so the tradition holds, the master. Within two years he was ordained presbyter. Within three, the people of Carthage would have him for their bishop.
Elected against his will
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