Athanasius 297 AD – 373 AD

Athanasius of Alexandria was a fourth-century Egyptian Christian theologian and bishop and the central defender of Nicene orthodoxy against the Arian doctrine in the decades following the Council of Nicaea. He spent more than seventeen years in five separate exiles for his uncompromising defense of the consubstantiality of the Son with the Father. His Life of Antony helped to popularize the monastic ideal in the Mediterranean world, and his On the Incarnation articulated the deification theology that would define Eastern Christianity. His thirty-ninth Festal Letter is the earliest list of the New Testament canon as we now have it.