St. Onuphrius was one of the Egyptian Desert Fathers who is helped lay the foundation of Eastern spirituality and monasticism in the 4th and 5th centuries, around the time that Christianity was emerging as the dominant faith of the Roman Empire. The name Onuphrius is thought to be a Hellenized form of a Coptic name
Unnufer
, from the Demotic Egyptian, meaning "perfect one", an epithet of the pagan god Osiris. There are two surviving accounts given of his life. This work, by St. Salonius, and another by Paphnutius the Ascetic. The provenance of this Greco-Latin work is unclear, although it appears to be a work of the 5th century, and may have reasonable historicity despite its geographic distance.