other · 235 · Caesarea in Cappadocia
Eusebius says Firmilian was so fond of Origen that he would send for him to come to his own region for the benefit of the churches, and at other times would go himself into Judea and spend time with him for his own improvement. The year here is the one in which Maximinus began his persecution of the heads of the churches — the year Origen wrote the Exhortation to Martyrdom — and a stay in Cappadocia at that moment is both what the sources imply and the reason the visit is remembered at all. What comes of it is not small. Firmilian held Caesarea in Cappadocia, the see Basil the Great would hold a century and a bit later, and the line running from Origen through him to the Cappadocian fathers is one of the channels by which Alexandrian theology reached the Greek church rather than dying with the man who taught it.
To have the best teacher in the church within reach — and, in the year Maximinus began on the heads of the churches, to give him somewhere to be.
A Cappadocian metropolitan formed by Alexandrian theology, and one of the real channels by which it reached the Greek church.