Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature to the End of the Sixth Century/Serapion, surnamed Sindonites

Serapion (11), surnamed Sindonites from the linen or cotton clothing he always wore; an Egyptian monk in the time of Palladius. Though uneducated, he knew the Scriptures by heart. Some of his sayings are recorded in the Verba Seniorum (Rosweyd, Vit. Pat. lib. v libell. vi. § 12, libell. xi. 31), and in the Apophthegmata Patrum (Coteler. Gr. Ecc. Monum. i. 685, 686) there is an account of his visit to a lewd woman, whom he brought to repentance. His missionary zeal led him to travel, but in more than apostolic poverty, and he even sold his volume of the gospel to relieve a destitute person, a circumstance alluded to by Socrates (iv. 23), though without naming Serapion. Once he sold himself as a slave to a theatrical company, and once to a Manichean family, with a view to converting them from their errors. He visited Athens and Sparta. At Rome he met Domninus, a disciple of Origen (Pallad. Laus Hist. 83, 84; Vit. Joan. Eleemos. c. 22 in Rosweyd, lib. i.). He died, aged 60, c. 400, not at Rome as stated in the Latin version of the Lausiac History, but in the desert, as in Heraclides (Paradis. c. 24) and the Greek of Palladius. The Greeks honoured his memory on May 21, the Menaea erroneously calling him ὁ ἀπὸ Σείδονος, belonging to Sidon. He may be the Serapion of Mar. 21 in the Latin Martyrologies (vid. D. C. A.), though the Roman Martyrology makes this one bp. of Thmuis.

[C.H.]