foundation · 240 · Neocaesarea
Neocaesarea in Pontus was his home city. The account of his episcopate comes chiefly from Gregory of Nyssa, writing about a hundred and thirty years later and writing a life rather than a chronicle: it is he who reports that Gregory found seventeen Christians in the city when he arrived and left only seventeen pagans in it when he died, and he who tells of the creed given in a night vision by John and the Mother of the Lord. Both belong to the received account and are marked as such here. What is checkable is that a creed attributed to him was still being recited at Neocaesarea in Nyssa's own day, that Basil the Great cites him as the authority his grandmother Macrina had learned the faith from, and that the miracle stories from which he takes the name Thaumaturgus were attached to him within living memory rather than centuries after.
To be bishop of a city where, on the traditional account, there were seventeen Christians.
A creed that outlived him by more than a century in that church, and a reputation as a wonderworker that got into his name.