Saint Epiphanius of Salamis

Epiphanius of Salamis (Ancient Greek: Ἐπιφάνιος; c. 310–320 – 403) was the bishop of Salamis, Cyprus, at the end of the 4th century. He is considered a saint and a Church Father by the Eastern Orthodox, Catholic Churches, and some Presbyterians. He gained a reputation as a strong defender of orthodoxy. He is best known for composing the Panarion, a compendium of eighty heresies, which also included pagan religions and philosophical systems. There has been much controversy over how many of the quotations attributed to him by the Byzantine Iconoclasts were actually by him. Regardless of this, he was clearly strongly against some contemporary uses of images in the church. Epiphanius was either born into a Romaniote Christian family or became a Christian in his youth. Either way, he was a Romaniote Jew who was born in the small settlement of Besanduk, near Eleutheropolis (modern-day Beit Guvrin in Israel), and lived as a monk in Egypt, where he was educated and came into contact with Valentinian groups. He returned to Roman Palestine around 333, when he was still a young man, and founded a monastery at Ad near Eleutheropolis, which is often mentioned in the polemics of Jerome with Rufinus and John, Bishop of Jerusalem. He was ordained a priest, and lived and studied as superior of the monastery in Ad, that he founded, for thirty years and gained much skill and knowledge in that position. In that position he gained the ability to speak in several languages, including Hebrew, Syriac, Egyptian, Greek, and Latin, and was called by Jerome on that account Pentaglossos ("Five-tongued"). Epiphanius was a contemporary of Hilarion (c. 291 – 371), an anchorite who followed the example of his Egyptian mentor, Anthony the Great (c. 251 – 356) retreating to the wilderness in the coastal area near Gaza and is considered by his biographer Jerome to be the founder of Palestinian monasticism, and Chariton (mid-3rd century – c. 350), founder of monasticism in the Judaean Desert.