HEGESIPPUS, SAINT

flourished 2nd century, ; feast day April 7 Greek Christian historian and champion of orthodoxy who opposed the heresy of Gnosticism (q.v.). His single known work, five books of memoirs, constitutes a prime source on the organizational structure and theological ferment of the primitive Christian church. Probably of Jewish descent, Hegesippus c. 180 composed his memoirs, containing a mlange of historical, doctrinal, polemical, and catechetical interpolations. In his memoirs he noted the succession of Roman bishops down to Pope Eleutherius (174-189), accenting, however, their doctrine rather than the chronology of succession. Recent scholarship infers Hegesippus' Hebraic background from the attention he pays in his memoirs to the Jewish-Christian community in Jerusalem and its history of episcopal leaders. The preservation of segments of his memoirs by the 4th-century historian Eusebius of Caesarea provides the most direct existing witness to the primitive church of Jerusalem and the fate of Palestinian Christianity as a result of the anti-Jewish pogrom conducted after AD 70 by the Roman emperors Vespasian and Domitian.