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ACARIUS the priest told us the following story:—“At the time when I was administering the Holy Offering I took good heed unto Mark the mourner, and I never gave it to him, but an angel did so from the altar; I saw, however, the palm of the hand of the angel who gave it unto him.” Now this Mark was a young man, and he could repeat by heart the New and the Old Testaments; he was meek beyond measure, and both in body and in thought he was purer than many.

ONCERNING Abbâ Paulus there were questions among the monks and anchorites who were living in the land of Egypt, and they asked who were the first monks who lived in the desert. And some of them remembered the saints of olden time, and said, “It hath been proved that the first to dwell in the desert were Saint Elijah the Prophet, and John the Baptist, and it is manifest that Elijah was immeasurably superior in ascetic excellence to the [other]monks, and, moreover, John was proclaimed in the womb to be a prophet before he was born.” Now there were many who contradicted this opinion and who asserted with firmness that Mâr Anthony was the first and the prince of them all, and also of the order [of monks]; but if we wish to learn the whole truth we shall discover that it was not Mâr Anthony who was the first [monk] that dwelt in the desert, but the blessed man Mâr Paulus. For I myself have seen the disciples of Mâr Anthony who buried him, and they it was who related unto us the history of the man Paulus the anchorite, the Theban, who was indeed the first [monk to live] in the desert; therefore we believe that it was not the blessed man [Anthony] who was the first to do this, as some men say, but Paulus, and for this reason I wish to narrate briefly the history of Paulus the anchorite, and how he began and how he ended his [career] in the days of Decius and Valerianus the persecutors, and [how] Cornelius made an end of the strife of his testimony for the sake of the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ in Rome.

Now this blessed man Paulus dwelt with his sister, who was the wife of a certain man; and their parents died and left