Julian the Missionary
An elderly priest attached to the exiled patriarch Theodosius of Alexandria. According to John of Ephesus the empress Theodora sent him to the Nobadae, where he spent two years and baptised the king and his nobles.
Julian is known here only from John of Ephesus, who admired him. He was a presbyter among the clergy around Theodosius, the patriarch of Alexandria whom the emperor had driven from his see, and he proposed to the empress Theodora a mission to the people beyond the Thebaid. John tells how she contrived that he should reach the king of the Nobadae before the envoys of Justinian I, and how the king accepted baptism from him and refused the emperor’s faith. Julian stayed two years. He told afterwards how he sat in caves full of water from nine in the morning until four in the afternoon to escape the heat. He handed the converts to Theodore, bishop of Philae, and returned to Constantinople (John of Ephesus, Ecclesiastical History 3.4.6–7). He had died shortly before Theodosius did (John of Ephesus, Ecclesiastical History 3.4.8). See the Conversion of the Nubian Kingdoms.
In the timeline
- about AD 543 to AD 580, estimated dateThe Conversion of the Nubian Kingdoms
John of Ephesus tells how the empress Theodora sent the priest Julian to the Nobadae on the Nile south of Egypt ahead of her husband’s envoys, so that they were baptised into the church that rejected Chalcedon, and how the bishop Longinus later baptised the king of Alodia.