St. Epiphanius of Salamis

Epiphanius was born around the year 315 in Besanduc, a village near Eleutheropolis in Palestine. He grew up in a Jewish family and converted to Christ as a young man. He went to Egypt and spent his early monastic formation among the Egyptian Fathers, returning to Palestine to found his own monastery near Eleutheropolis, which he ruled for some thirty years.

He was known in his own lifetime for the rigor of his Faith, the breadth of his languages (Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic, and some Egyptian, the five-tongued doctor in the tradition), and his uncompromising opposition to every heresy he encountered. Around 367 he was called to the throne of Salamis in Cyprus and consecrated archbishop of the island, a see he held for the remaining thirty-six years of his life.

Around 374 he composed the Ancoratus (the "anchored one"), a long treatise on the Faith intended to give the ordinary Christian an anchor against the storms of heresy. At the end of the Ancoratus he set out a long baptismal creed which, in its main lines, agrees almost word for word with the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed that the Second Ecumenical Council would issue seven years later. The scholarly tradition since Tillemont has held that the Council did not invent its Symbol but received and ratified a creed already in liturgical use in the East, of which the Epiphanian text is the principal documentary witness.

Around 377 he composed the Panarion (the "medicine chest," sometimes translated as Against the Heresies): a long encyclopedic refutation of eighty heresies, from the first century to his own day. The Panarion is one of the most-used patristic sources for the early history of Gnostic and post-Nicene heresy, and many heresies (including the Ebionites and several Jewish-Christian groups) are known to us today principally because Epiphanius described them.

In his last years he was drawn into the Origenist controversy on the side of the rigorists, and travelled to Constantinople at the request of his old correspondent the empress Eudoxia, who wanted his weight against St. John Chrysostom. He arrived in Constantinople, learned more of the situation, regretted being there, and embarked on a ship for Cyprus. He died at sea on the return voyage, on May 12, 403, in the eighty-eighth year of his life and the thirty-sixth of his episcopate.