Saint Dionysius of Corinth

Dionysius was bishop of Corinth in the second century, and almost everything we know about him we owe to Eusebius of Caesarea, who preserved fragments of eight of his letters — plus a few lines from Jerome. Those letters went to the Churches of Athens, Sparta, Amastris in Pontus, Knossos in Crete, and Rome. The beauty of it is that the surviving fragments hardly ever talk about him: they talk about the communities he was writing to. How they lived, what they argued about, what problems they had. That’s why those few passages are worth so much: they are one of the few windows we have onto the Christianity of that century, when there were still no councils and no Christian emperors, only cities and the letters that traveled between them. In one of them Dionysius complains about something very modern: someone had altered his writings, adding and cutting, and doctored copies were going around. The Roman Martyrology commemorates him as a martyr, but there is no reliable information about his death. If your name is Dionysius, today is your name day.