Paphnutius, an Egyptian, was a disciple of Saint Anthony the Great and later a bishop of a city in the Upper Thebaid in the early fourth century.

He had been persecuted for his Christian beliefs, and had been hamstrung on the left side and suffered the loss of his right eye for the Faith under the Emperor Maximinus, and was subsequently condemned to the mines.

He proposed, in accordance "with the ancient tradition of the Church", that only those who were celibates at the time of ordination should continue to observe continence, but, on the other hand, that "none should be separated from her, to whom, while yet unordained, he had been united".

[2] The great veneration in which he was held, and the well-known fact that he had himself observed the strictest chastity all his life, gave weight to his proposal, which was later unanimously adopted.

His participation in the First Ecumenical Council was disputed several times, among others by Alfons Maria Cardinal Stickler, a canon law historian.

The main arguments were laid down by Karl Josef von Hefele in his Conciliengeschichte (1855),[8] and were taken up by his successor at the Tübingen Catholic faculty of theology Franz Xaver von Funk, as well as by some other eminent historians as Elphège Vacandard in the article on celibacy in the prestigious Dictionnaire de théologie catholique (1905) and Henri Leclercq in an article in the Histoire des conciles (1908).

The discourse ascribed to Paphnutius, and the consequent decision of the Synod, agree very well with the text of the Apostolic Constitutions, and with the whole practice of the Greek Church in respect to celibacy.

The Greek Church did not, however, adopt this rigour in reference to priests, deacons, and subdeacons, but by degrees it came to be required of bishops and of the higher order of clergy in general, that they should live in celibacy.

Thomassin believes that Synesius did not seriously require this condition, and only spoke thus for the sake of escaping the episcopal office; which would seem to imply that in his time Greek bishops had already begun to live in celibacy.

... Natalis Alexander gives this anecdote about Paphnutius in full: he desired to refute Bellarmin, who considered it to be untrue and an invention of Socrates to please the Novatians.