To my most reverend and God-beloved lord, Bishop Innocent, John in the Lord greetings.
A 1. Even before our letter reached you, I believe your reverence had heard of the lawlessness perpetrated here. For the gravity of these evils has left almost no part of the world ignorant of this miserable tragedy. The report of what has happened has reached the very ends of the earth, causing weeping and lamentation everywhere. But since it is not enough to weep, but one must also take corrective action and consider how this most grievous storm of the Church might be stilled, we have deemed it necessary to persuade my most honorable and reverend lords, the bishops Demetrius, Pansophius, Pappus, and Eugenius, to leave their own churches and entrust themselves to the sea, and to undertake so long a journey, that they might hasten to your love and clearly explain everything, so that the correction might be prepared as quickly as possible. To them we have joined our most honorable and beloved deacons, Paul and Cyriacus; and they themselves will, in the form of a letter, briefly explain to your love the things that have occurred.
For Theophilus, who was entrusted with the oversight of the Church in Alexandria B—after certain persons had petitioned the most pious Emperor against him, and he had been commanded to arrive alone—gathered with himself a multitude of Egyptian bishops, not a few; he arrived as if wishing to show from the beginning that he had come for war and battle. Then, having stepped into the great and God-beloved Constantinople, he did not enter the church according to custom and the law that has prevailed from of old; he did not meet with us, nor did he share in speech, nor in prayer, nor in communion. But, stepping down from the ship and bypassing the threshold of the church, he went away and lodged somewhere outside the city, and having...