View source for Porphyrios of Gaza

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Our father among the saints '''Porphyrios of Gaza''' ({{el icon}}: ''' ''Πορφύριος'' '''; {{la icon}}: ''' ''Porphyrius'' '''; {{cu icon}}: ''' ''Порфирий, Porfiriy'' ''') was the Bishop of Gaza from 395 to 420 AD, known from the account in his ''Life'' for [[Missionary|Christianizing]] the recalcitrant [[pagan]] city of Gaza, and having its temples demolished. His [[feast day]] is celebrated on [[February 26]] / March 11 (March 10).<ref name=SYNAX>Great Synaxaristes: {{el icon}} ''[http://synaxarion.gr/gr/sid/2244/sxsaintinfo.aspx Ὁ Ἅγιος Πορφύριος Ἐπίσκοπος Γάζης].'' 26 Φεβρουαρίου. ΜΕΓΑΣ ΣΥΝΑΞΑΡΙΣΤΗΣ.</ref>

Saint Porphyrios of Gaza is known to us from the ''Vita Porphyrii'', the vivid biography by Mark the Deacon,<ref group="note">Mark the Deacon was a monk in the Egyptian desert of Scetis (Wadi El Natrun) who became the biographer of Saint Porphyrius in the 5th century. He was, at a later date, made [[deacon]] of his church. To effect the sale of the property still owned by Porphyrius in his native city, Mark set out for [[Thessalonica]] and, upon his return, the proceeds were distributed among the monasteries of Egypt and among the necessitous in and around Jerusalem. His masterpiece, the ''"Vita S. Porphyrii"'' ("Life of St. Porphyrius"), formerly known only in a Latin translation, was published in 1874 by M. Haupt in its original Greek text. A new edition was issued in 1895 by the Bonn Philological Society.</ref> which is a contemporary account that chronicles in some detail the end of [[paganism]] in Gaza in the early fifth century.<ref group="note">The text has come down to us in a Greek and a Georgian recension. [[w:Henri Grégoire (historian)|Grégoire]] and Kugener (1930), the editors of the ''Vita Porphyrii'', reviewed the challenges to the integrity of the work and summarized the previous scholarship. These included the lack of other attestation to major figures, including Porphyry himself, in an otherwise well-documented period of history. But they concluded that the text had a historical basis and ''"that the solution of most problems is to be found in the fact that the text of the Vita transmitted to us represents a revision of the sixth century, which borrowed from the church history of [[Theodoret of Cyrrhus]] of 444..."'' In addition, Paul Peeters (1941) published the Georgian texts, and showed that they depended on a lost Syriac original that must have been written in the later fifth or sixth century.</ref>