Hieromartyr Dorotheus Bishop of Tyre

Episcopate and Witness

The tradition presents Dorotheus as a learned shepherd whose long life bridged the eras of persecution and imperial favor. Having survived the Diocletianic persecution by withdrawal rather than confrontation, he returned to a Church newly at peace and devoted decades to the instruction and expansion of his flock, the sources crediting him with the conversion of many pagans during his more than fifty years on the throne of Tyre.

Some accounts add further detail to his career: that he had earlier been a learned priest of Antioch and a teacher of the church historian Eusebius of Caesarea, that he attended the First Ecumenical Council at Nicaea in 325, and that he was a eunuch. His martyrdom came at the very end of a life of extreme length; too old to be a public threat, he was nonetheless sought out under Julian, and his refusal to sacrifice brought him the death he had earlier evaded. Because he was both a bishop and put to death for the faith, he is reckoned a hieromartyr.

Attributed Writings

Dorotheus is remembered as a learned man, and several works circulated under his name in later centuries. Orthodox sources associate him with a compilation sometimes called 'The Synopsis,' described as a collection of sayings together with lives of the holy prophets and apostles, and he is traditionally credited with an 'Acts of the Seventy Apostles,' a work that has been thought possibly identical to a lost 'Gospel of the Seventy' concerning the seventy disciples commissioned in the Gospel of Luke.

Modern scholarship treats these attributions with caution: a number of texts bearing his name are regarded as pseudepigraphic and are conventionally assigned to a 'Pseudo-Dorotheus,' so that the precise extent of his own literary output remains uncertain.

Veneration

Dorotheus is venerated as a hieromartyr, a bishop who died for the faith, and is commemorated on June 5 by the Gregorian reckoning, corresponding to June 18 on the Julian calendar. Because his repose preceded the Council of Chalcedon, he belongs to the undivided Church and is honored in both the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic traditions.