.jpg%3Fwidth%3D1600&w=3840&q=75)
The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Fathers & the Creeds
Ambrosiaster
died c. 384Patristic
The anonymous Roman commentator on Paul whom the church read for a thousand years believing he was Ambrose.
Pictured: the era he stood in — The First Council of Nicaea — Vasily Surikov (1876), public domain
Summary
- Lived died c. 384.
- Stood in The Fathers & the Creeds (AD 313–600).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Western.
The life
Ambrosiaster is a nickname for a man whose name was lost. It was coined by Erasmus in the sixteenth century, and it means roughly "the pseudo-Ambrose", because for a thousand years the church read this author's commentary on Paul believing it was the work of Ambrose of Milan. It is not.
What can be said with confidence comes from the text itself. He wrote at Rome. He wrote during the pontificate of Damasus, which fixes him between 366 and 384. He used the Old Latin Bible, not Jerome's new Vulgate, which is one reason his commentary matters: it preserves the Latin text of Paul as it stood before Jerome revised it. He knew Roman law and Roman civic life well, and he wrote for readers who did too.
His achievement is the first complete Latin commentary on the thirteen letters of Paul. It is not allegorical and not showy. He explains what the apostle is saying, sentence by sentence, in ordinary Latin, with attention to the historical situation of each church Paul was writing to. Where a passage is hard, he says so and gives his best reading. Augustine used him. Pelagius used him. The medieval schools used him constantly, believing all the while that they were reading Ambrose.
A second large work, the Questions on the Old and New Testament, is generally credited to the same hand. It travelled under Augustine's name, which is the same accident happening twice.
His reading of Romans 5:12 became one of the most consequential sentences in Western theology. The Old Latin rendered Paul's Greek as "in whom all sinned" referring the phrase to Adam, and Ambrosiaster read it that way. Augustine took the reading from him and built on it, and the doctrine of original sin in the West carries the mark of a Latin translation that an anonymous Roman commentator explained without fuss.
Guesses at his identity have included Isaac the converted Jew, the Roman official Decimius Hilarianus Hilarius, and others. None has held. What is left is the work: clear, sober, unmistakably the product of a trained mind, and completely anonymous.
Sources: Ambrosiaster, Commentaries on the Pauline Epistles (Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 81); Alexander Souter, A Study of Ambrosiaster (1905); The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "Ambrosiaster".
What was happening while he lived7 moments · AD 313–600
- 313The Edict of Milan makes Christianity legalConstantine and Licinius agreed that everyone in the empire could worship as they chose, and ordered confiscated church property returned. After nearly three centuries of being an illegal religion, the church woke up protected.
- 325The Council of NicaeaAbout three hundred bishops met in a lakeside town in what is now Turkey to answer Arius, an Alexandrian pastor who taught that the Son was God's first and greatest creature, glorious, but made, so that "there was when He was not." The council answered with one word: the Son is *homoousios* with the Father, of the very same being, begotten, not made.
- 335Athanasius is exiled for the first timeThe bishop of Alexandria, who had been at Nicaea as a young deacon, was banished to Trier in Germany after a rigged synod. Four more exiles followed; he spent roughly seventeen of his forty-five years as bishop away from his city.
- 367Athanasius's Easter letter lists the twenty-sevenHis thirty-ninth Festal Letter names exactly the twenty-seven books of the New Testament we use today, the earliest surviving list that matches ours. Councils at Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) confirmed the same list in the West.
- 380Nicene Christianity becomes the empire's official religionThe Edict of Thessalonica, issued by Theodosius I, commanded all his subjects to hold the faith of Nicaea. Legal protection had become legal privilege, and pressure on everyone else.
- 381The Council of ConstantinopleAround a hundred and fifty bishops confirmed Nicaea and expanded its article on the Holy Spirit, who "proceeds from the Father" and "together with the Father and the Son is worshiped and glorified." This 381 text is the creed most churches actually recite as the Nicene Creed.
- 386Augustine converts in a Milan gardenA thirty-one-year-old professor of rhetoric, weeping under a fig tree, heard a child's voice chanting "take up and read," opened Paul's letter to the Romans, and stopped running. His mother Monica had prayed for him for years; Bishop Ambrose's preaching had already broken his objections.
In their own words
“Paul is not ordering the Corinthians to send money to those who are suffering want but encouraging them to do so, demonstrating that they have the right attitude toward God and others. In return for their generosity they will undoubtedly receive a reward.”
COMMENTARY ON PAUL'S EPISTLES · on 2 Corinthians 8:8
“I am not making a demand, but I am testing the sincerity of your love in comparison to the earnestness of others.”
“In this way the believers among the Jews would rejoice at God's providential saving of the Gentiles through their ministry. For these Gentiles, by giving themselves completely to the service of God and not caring at all about the things of this world, offered an …”
COMMENTARY ON PAUL'S EPISTLES · on Romans 15:27
“They were pleased to do it, and indeed they owe it to them. For if the Gentiles have shared in their spiritual blessings, they are obligated to minister to them with material blessings.”
“Both the congregation and Epaphroditus were sad because of his sickness. They hoped that they might, on seeing him, be reassured in his recovery of health and that he might be relieved of his present anxiety to see them. For he was their apostle, appointed …”
EPISTLE TO THE PHILIPPIANS 2.27.1 · on Philippians 2:26
“For he has been longing for all of you and is distressed because you heard he was ill.”
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Ambrosiaster at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
An unnamed Roman whose clear commentary on Paul was read for a thousand years under somebody else's name.
Hangs on The Fathers: The men who carried the faith out of the apostles' hands, and wrote down what they had received.
Standing beside himThe Fathers & the Creeds · 130 on this stretch of wall
Exiled five separate times for refusing to say the Son was anything less than God, they called it Athanasius against the world.
Made a Roman emperor stand outside the church door until he repented of a massacre.
Heard 'sell what you have' read aloud in church, walked into the Egyptian desert, and started monasticism.
A brilliant, restless sinner whose mother prayed for him thirty years; his Confessions still read like a man talking straight to God.
Built an entire town for the sick and the poor outside his city, and wrote the rule Eastern monks still live by.
Preached five sermons in a tiny borrowed chapel that settled how the whole church speaks about the Trinity.