Cappadocia

Cappadocia was a large, high plateau region in the interior of Asia Minor (modern central Turkey), bounded by the Taurus Mountains to the south, Pontus to the north, and Armenia to the east. It became a Roman province in AD 17 under Tiberius. In the New Testament, Cappadocians are listed among the diaspora Jews present in Jerusalem on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:9), hearing the apostles' proclamation in their own language. First Peter addresses its epistle to "the strangers dispersed" through Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia (1 Pet. 1:1), indicating an early Christian community there. Cappadocia later became one of the most theologically significant regions in early Christianity: the Cappadocian Fathers — Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa — in the fourth century developed the classical Trinitarian theology that was enshrined at the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople.

Scripture's two glimpses of Cappadocia frame it as a land of pilgrims and sojourners. Devout Cappadocian Jews were present in Jerusalem at Pentecost and heard the mighty works of God declared in their own tongue (Acts 2:11), carrying the first word of the gospel home to the plateau; and Peter later wrote to the scattered believers of the region as "elect exiles" (1 Peter 1:1), urging them as "sojourners and exiles" to live holy lives among the nations, their true citizenship in heaven (1 Peter 2:11).

In the fourth century this remote province gave the church three of its greatest teachers — the Cappadocian Fathers: Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Gregory of Nyssa. Against the Arian denial of the Son's full deity, they refined the church's confession of one God in three persons (one ousia, three hypostases) and secured the faith of Nicaea at the Council of Constantinople in AD 381. Their labor ensured that the church would forever confess the Son as "true God from true God," of one being with the Father. So a quiet land of cave-dwellings and pilgrims became a wellspring of the church's worship of the one triune God revealed in Jesus Christ.