Saint Evaristus

Evaristus is the first pope about whom nothing is known beyond his name and his place in the list. Irenaeus, writing around 180, put him fourth after the apostles; Eusebius dated his accession to the third year of Trajan and gave him eight years. Everything else was supplied four centuries later by the Liber Pontificalis, which made him a Greek born at Antioch to a Jewish father from Bethlehem, credited him with dividing the city's churches among the presbyters and ordaining seven deacons to assist the bishop, and had him crowned with martyrdom and buried beside Peter.

His pontificate does coincide with the first surviving glimpse of how the empire regarded people like him. Around 112, within a few years of his death, Pliny the Younger, governing Bithynia, wrote to Trajan asking what to do with those denounced as Christians, and the emperor replied that they were not to be sought out, that anonymous accusations were to be ignored, and that anyone who recanted and sacrificed was to be pardoned. That uneasy formula, illegal but unhunted, was the condition under which Evaristus and his successors lived for a century. What the bishop of Rome made of it, or whether he ever heard of it, the record does not say.