The community was organised under its “overseer” or bishop, who soon took the title of patriarch, and appointed bishops elsewhere in Egypt. The earliest centres were (i) the oratory of St. Mark which stood by the sea shore—probably to the east of Silsileh—and was afterwards enlarged into a Cathedral; (ii) a later cathedral church dedicated (285) by the Patriarch Theonas to the Virgin Mary; it was on the site of the present Franciscan Church by the Docks. (iii) a Theological College—the “Catechetical School,” founded about 200, where Clement of Alexandria and Origen taught—site unknown.
It was its “bad behaviour,” to use Hadrian’s term, that brought the community into notice—that is to say, its refusal to worship the Emperors. To the absurd spiritual claims of the state, Christianity opposed the claims of the individual conscience, and the conflict was only allayed by the state itself becoming Christian. The conflict came to its height in Alexandria, which, more than any other city in the Empire, may claim to have won the battle for the new religion. Persecution, at first desultory, grew under Decius, and culminated in the desperate measures of Diocletian (303)—demolition of churches, all Christian officials degraded, all Christian non-officials enslaved. Diocletian, an able ruler—the great column miscalled Pompey’s is his memorial—did not persecute from personal spite, but the results were no less appalling and definitely discredited the pagan state. While we need not accept the Egyptian Church’s estimate of 144,000 martyrs in nine years, there is no doubt that numbers perished in all ranks of society. Among the victims was St. Menas, a young Egyptian soldier who became patron of the desert west of Lake Mariout, where a great church was built over his grave. St. Catherine of Alexandria is also said to have died under Diocletian, but it is improbable that she ever lived; she and her wheel were creations of Western Catholicism, and the land of her supposed sufferings has only recognised her out of politeness to the French. The persecution was vain, the state was defeated, and the Egyptian Church, justly triumphant, dates its chronology, not from the birth of Christ, but from the “Era of Martyrs” (A.D. 284). A few years later the Emperor Constantine made Christianity official, and the menace from without came to an end.
