CAESAREA MARITIMA. – A city of Palestine built between 25 and 12 BC by Herod the Great, who dedicated it to Caesar Augustus. Before this, at a distance of 38 km south of Mount Carmel, stood the Tower of Strato. Herod dedicated the port to Augustus, naming it Sebaste, built a temple in honour of the emperor and the goddess Roma, an amphitheatre and other pagan buildings, of which imposing ruins remain. When Judaea passed under direct Roman rule, Caesarea became the seat of the procurators who established themselves in Herod’s palace (Acts 23:35).
Christianity reached the city at an early date. There dwelt the deacon Philip with his four prophetess daughters (Acts 8:40; 21:8). St Peter baptised Cornelius, a centurion of the Italian cohort (Acts 10), the first Gentile convert to the Church. King Herod Agrippa I, who there arrogantly sought popular favour, met with a shameful death (Acts 12:19–22; cf. Flavius Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae, XIX, 8, 2). St Paul, who had passed through on his way from Jerusalem to Tarsus, returned there after his second and third apostolic journeys, having been arrested in Jerusalem. He was detained there for two years as a prisoner (AD 58–60) under the procurators Felix and Festus; there he appealed to Caesar and, after defending himself also before Agrippa II and Bernice, embarked for Rome (Acts 9:30; 18:22; 21:8; 23:23–27).
It was therefore an episcopal see from the earliest times. In 195 a synod held there decreed that Easter should be celebrated on Sunday. About AD 232, Origen, exiled from Alexandria, transferred his famous school to Caesarea, where many disciples studied, among them St Gregory the Wonderworker. A Caesarean school thus came into being, which remained ever faithful to the memory of Origen. Towards the end of the 3rd century, St Pamphilus, bishop and former disciple of Pierius of Alexandria, taught there. His disciple and successor was Eusebius, the historian, whose views inclined towards Arianism.
More pronouncedly Arian was the bishop Acacius, leader of the ‘Homoean’ party. The scientific tradition did not die out at Caesarea. Bishop Gelasius published his historical writings, now lost, in the second half of the 4th century, and these appear to have been used by Rufinus. The rich library with its attached archive was probably lost in the 7th century with the Muslim invasion, and from that time the city shared the fate of the other cities of Palestine. When, towards the end of the 11th century, Caesarea was captured by the Crusaders, it became the seat of a Latin metropolitan see dependent on the Latin patriarchate of Jerusalem. Taken by Saladin, it was retaken by the Crusaders on 7 September 1101, fortified by St Louis IX of France, and destroyed by Bibars in 1265. Today Caesarea is the seat of a Melkite bishop.