Paul of Thebes
Christian hermit
Paul of Thebes (Coptic: Ⲁⲃⲃⲁ Ⲡⲁⲩⲗⲉ; Koine Greek: Παῦλος ὁ Θηβαῖος, Paûlos ho Thēbaîos; Latin: Paulus Eremita; c. 227 – c. 341), commonly known as Paul the First Hermit or Paul the Anchorite, was an Egyptian saint regarded as the first Christian hermit and grazer, who was claimed to have lived alone in the desert of Thebes in Roman Egypt from the age of 16 to the age of 113 years old. He was canonized in 491 by Pope Gelasius I, and is venerated as a saint by the Catholic Church, Eastern Orthodox Church, and Oriental Orthodox Churches.
Legend
The Life of Saint Paul the First Hermit was written in Latin by Jerome, probably in 375–376.
Paul of Thebes was born around 227 in the Thebaid of Egypt. Paul and his married sister lost their parents. In order to obtain Paul's inheritance, his brother-in-law sought to betray him to the persecutors. According to Jerome's Vitae Patrum (Vita Pauli primi eremitae), Paul fled to the Theban desert as a young man during the persecution of Decius and Valerianus around AD 250.
He lived in the mountains of this desert in a cave near a clear spring and a palm tree, the leaves of which provided him with clothing and the fruit of which provided him with his only source of food until he was 43 years old, when a raven started bringing him half a loaf of bread daily.
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This entry incorporates text from “Paul of Thebes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.