Gregentios

Gregentios was Archbishop of Taphar in Yemen in the 6th century . He is a saint of the Orthodox Church (feast day December 19 ).

According to his legendary Greek life, Gregentios came from Lyplianes in the land of the Avars (presumably today's Ljubljana in Slovenia) and traveled via Agrigento , Milan , Carthage and Rome to Egypt , from where he lived in the time of Emperor Justin I (518-527) set out as a missionary to the land of the Homerites ( Himyar ) in what is now Yemen . The Christian Abreha ruled there after an Ethiopian expedition under King Elesboam ( Ella Asbeha ) overthrew the Jewish King Yusuf Asʾar Yathʾar (Du Nuwas). Gregentios passed laws for the Himyars on his behalf, converted the remaining Jews through a five-day religious conversation with the scribe Herban and then worked as Archbishop of Taphar ( Zafar ) for thirty years until his death .

Gregentios is clearly an invented figure; his vita contains gross geographical errors and anachronisms. Only the account of the events in Yemen goes back to an old, now lost source about the historical events of the early 6th century. The entire text, consisting of the actual life, the laws and the religious talk, was only written by a single author in Constantinople around 960 . The three parts of this corpus were later also passed down separately, most often the religious talk, and this and the laws were often considered authentic works of the early 6th century until almost the present day.

literature

Life and Works of Saint Gregentios, Archbishop of Taphar. Edited by Albrecht Berger , with a contribution by Gianfranco Fiaccadori. Berlin, DeGruyter 2006. ISBN 978-3-11-018445-7 .
Albrecht Berger: Gregentios. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 22, Bautz, Nordhausen 2003, ISBN 3-88309-133-2 , Sp. 460-461. ( Article / beginning of article in Internet archive )

Web links

Literature by and about Gregentios in the catalog of the German National Library

Remarks

↑ cf. Berger, Albrecht (Ed.): Life and Works of Saint Gregentios, Archbishop of Taphar: Introduction, Critical Edition and Translation , Berlin 2006, p. 14.

personal data
SURNAME	Gregentios
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Archbishop of Taphar (Yemen) and saint of the Orthodox Church
DATE OF BIRTH	5th century or 6th century
DATE OF DEATH	6th century

[1] . Berger, Albrecht (Ed.): Life and Works of Saint Gregentios, Archbishop of Taphar: Introduction, Critical Edition and Translation , Berlin 2006, p. 14.