other · 350 · Jerusalem
Nineteen lectures to the candidates during Lent and five to the newly baptised in Easter week, delivered in the Martyrium basilica beside the Holy Sepulchre. What makes them extraordinary is that they are not a treatise: somebody wrote them down as they were spoken, so they preserve the asides, the warnings not to repeat any of this to the uninitiated, and the physical setting — he points at the wood of the cross, kept in that building, as evidence. The five mystagogical lectures describe the rite step by step: the renunciation facing west, the turn to the east, the stripping, the anointing, the threefold immersion, the chrism, and the eucharist with the epiclesis. Nothing else from the fourth century shows the machinery of initiation this plainly, and this dataset had his tenure dated and nothing under it.
To prepare a class of catechumens for baptism at Easter, in the church built over the tomb.
A transcript, taken down by someone in the audience, of what a fourth-century bishop actually told people before and after their baptism.