Early Life
He was born around 590 in Barshüt, in the Beheira region of the western Nile Delta area. Comparatively little is known about his early life, other than that he came from a Coptic family of comfortable means. The proximity of his home to the capital city of Alexandria has led some to assume that he received some education there.
No details on his family life are known, other than that he had one brother, Mennas. Mennas is known for having been tortured with fire and, eventually, being drowned in the Nile by the Byzantine Patriarch Cyrus of Alexandria for refusing to take the Chalcedonian profession of faith and refusing to reveal the whereabouts of Benjamin, who was himself a fugitive at that time.
Read more about this topic: Pope Benjamin I Of Alexandria
Famous quotes related to early life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)