Victorinus of Pettau

Victorinus was bishop of Poetovio in Pannonia — a Roman garrison town on the Drava river, in what is now Ptuj in Slovenia. He wrote in the second half of the third century, and he was the first Latin-speaking Christian to write commentaries on books of the Bible. Jerome, who knew his work well and used it, made a blunt observation about him: he did not know Latin as well as he knew Greek, and so his works, though excellent in matter, are inferior in style. Victorinus was reading Greek exegesis — Origen, Hippolytus, Irenaeus — and carrying it west into a language that had no commentary tradition yet. His Commentary on the Apocalypse is the oldest surviving Latin commentary on Revelation, and one of the oldest commentaries of any kind. He read the book by what he called recapitulation: the seals, the trumpets, and the bowls are not a sequence of successive events but the same period told three times over, from different angles. That reading has been argued about ever since and is still one of the live options. He also expected a literal thousand-year reign of Christ on earth after the resurrection of the just — the position later called chiliasm or millenarianism, which was the common view of the second and third century church and which the West largely abandoned after Augustine. Jerome held the later view, and when he reissued Victorinus's commentary he edited the ending, cutting the millenarian passages and substituting his own. For centuries only Jerome's version was known. The original text was recovered in the modern era, and both recensions can now be compared. Another work survives, On the Creation of the World, a short treatment of the seven days. He also, Jerome says, wrote commentaries on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Habakkuk, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs, and a book against all heresies. Those are lost. Jerome ends the entry with one line: and at the last he was crowned with martyrdom. The Great Persecution began in 303, and Victorinus is usually placed among its dead, about 304. Nothing further is recorded — no trial, no account, no place. The record of his death is a single clause in a fourth-century catalogue. Sources: Jerome, On Illustrious Men 74, and Letters 58 and 70; Victorinus, Commentary on the Apocalypse and On the Creation of the World (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7); Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2.