Library › Egeria › Pilgrimage of Etheria

Pilgrimage of Etheria

Egeria, tr. McClure and Feltoe, 1919

d5

5. The Ecclesiastical Organization

Etheria practically gives no description and makes no comment on the Church organization of the districts through which she journeyed, except that she mentions (1) the bishops and other clergy whom she met, often saying that they had been, or still were, from among the ranks of the monastic orders, and (2) the churches in which they ministered. At the end of the fourth century Egypt was an independent province under the Patriarch of Alexandria, but the part of Egypt she mostly mentions would hardly have been organized by that time into what afterwards became known as Augustanica Prima, with fourteen bishops, the chief of whom was at Pelusium. The bishop of Jerusalem had had special privileges granted him at the Council of Nicaea (325), but he was still “under the jurisdiction of his provincial metropolitan, the Bishop of Caesarea” (Duchesne, op. cit., p. 27): and therefore probably the clergy west of the Jordan she had to do with outside the Holy City were likewise dependent on the latter. To the east and north-east of the Jordan as far as Hierapolis (p. 31) the places she visited were probably all in the domain of the Patriarch of Antioch, while those in Mesopotamia would be under the Catholicos of Armenia.