PANTENUS. - Eusebius (Hist. eccl., V, 10) relates that, in the time of Commodus, P. was the head of the school for biblical studies at Alexandria and that he took his starting point from Stoic philosophy (according to Philip of Side, from Pythagorean philosophy). With this notice another that follows (10, 2) stands in contrast: P. was ordained a missionary to the peoples of the East and sent as far as India. His mission as an apostolic "evangelist" is narrated according to Eusebius's general conception of the "evangelists" (v. Eusebius, op. cit., III, 37, 2). Their task is, among other things, to transmit a written Gospel.
P., however, was to discover that the Gospel of Matthew, written in Hebrew letters, had already been spread by Bartholomew in India (10, 3); v. also Ephraem, Evangelior. concord., ed. Moessinger, Venice 1876, p. 286). P. died, as head of the school, where he taught orally, but also through his writings (10, 4): thus Eusebius's account closes. The conflicting tendencies between P. as head of the school, philosopher and author of books, and P. as evangelist, exegete and teacher of an oral instruction, are perhaps explained thus, that the former reveals the later Alexandrian tradition about P. It is not to be maintained that P. was head of the famous school, which in his time perhaps did not yet exist (cf. J.
Munck, Untersuchungen über Klemens von Alexandrien, Stuttgart 1933, p. 185). It is generally said - following an indication of Eusebius, Hist. eccl., V, 11, 2, p. 452, 10 ff. ed. Schwartz - that he was mentioned, but without being named, by Clement in Strom., I, 11, 2, and that he is to be identified with the "Sicilian bee," so that P. would have been Sicilian by origin. But this identification is neither certain nor plausible. If P. the evangelist went to India (perhaps southern Arabia, or Axum; v. A. Harnack, Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums, Leipzig 1924, II, p. 698; M. Simon, Verus Israël, Paris 1948, p. 311), where he found the Gospel of the Hebrews (Hebrew Matthew), it is more probable that he should be identified with the Hebrew of Palestine whom Clement mentions (Strom., I, 11, 2) among his teachers and who was probably the vehicle of apostolic traditions that came from James the Just (Strom., I, 11, 3); and thus one may suppose that P. transmitted local Palestinian traditions, perhaps even with a Jewish-Gnostic tendency, to Clement. The various hypotheses about the part P. would have had in Clement's work (W. Bousset, Jüdisch-christl. Schulbetrieb in Alexandria, Göttingen 1915, and Munck, loc. cit.) cannot be proved. One can only suppose that Clement transmitted many exegetical traditions of P. under a citation of the "presbyters" in his (for the most part lost) Hypotyposeis, while the name of P. is found only once in Eclog. proph., 56, 2. P. was one of these ancient presbyters, transmitters of the oral apostolic tradition: the "presbyters" did not write (Ecl. proph., 27, 7). The attribution of books to P. by Eusebius and others is perhaps explained by admitting that traditions of P., more or less authentic, were published in the form of books by pupils of P. or adherents of the Alexandrian school.