The life of St Gregory the Wonderworker
That teacher's direct influence brought him into the Christian faith, and Gregory returned home to become bishop of his native city, where over the following decades he did as much as any single bishop of Asia Minor to plant and strengthen the young Christian community there.
Very little of his actual pastoral work survives in reliable detail, and what remains of his own theological writing is incomplete. The renown that earned him his familiar title, Thaumaturgus, the Wonderworker, rests chiefly on a body of miracle stories that developed in later, largely legendary accounts of his life, material historians treat with real caution; only the Life written afterward by Gregory of Nyssa, whose own grandmother had been among Gregory's converts, is generally judged to preserve anything close to reliable memory of him, and even that later tradition shows signs of the story already blurring by the time it was retold around the year 400.
He died around 270, remembered as a foundational figure for Christianity in Pontus whatever the truth behind the wonders later ages attached to his name.
