Saint Pothinus
2nd century bishop of Lyon and saint
Saint Pothinus (French: Saint Pothin; c. 87 – c. 177) was the first bishop of Lyon and the first bishop of Gaul. He is first mentioned in a letter attributed to Irenaeus of Lyon. The letter was sent from the Christian communities of Lyon and Vienne to the Roman province of Asia.
History
According to Irenaeus, Pothinus was born around the year 87, probably at Smyrna. He was a disciple of Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, and accompanied him to Rome in 158.
Pope Anicetus sent him to evangelize the Gauls. Pothinus established himself at Lyon, and founded there a flourishing Church, over which he presided for almost twenty years. In asserting his own authority as bishop of Lyon, Irenaeus says that Pothinus had been his predecessor in the position, and the first holder of that office.
By 177, a large number of the Christians in the area of Vienne and Lyon were Greeks from Asia. A violent persecution was there against them while Pothinus was bishop of Lyon, and Irenæus, who had been sent there by Polycarp out of Asia, was a priest of that city.
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This entry incorporates text from “Saint Pothinus” 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.