Moses the Black

Moses was Nubian, born around 330, and the stories say he lived by crime before something turned him. He left that life and joined the desert ascetics in Egypt, becoming a hieromonk—a monk in holy orders—among the men who would shape early Christian monasticism. His conversion was sharp enough that later generations called him Moses the Strong, Moses the Robber, a man who had been one thing and became another. The historian Sozomen wrote about him roughly seventy years after his death in 405, and by then Moses was already a figure both Orthodox churches would venerate: proof that the distance…