Apringius of Beja

Apringius was bishop of Pax Julia, the town now called Beja, in southern Portugal, in the middle of the sixth century. Spain and Portugal were then ruled by the Visigoths, and Apringius wrote under King Theudis, whose reign runs from 531 to 548. That is how his commentary is dated: he mentions the king.

He wrote a commentary on the Apocalypse, the book of Revelation. Isidore of Seville, writing a couple of generations later in his catalogue of Christian authors, praised it and said Apringius had expounded the Apocalypse with more subtlety and better sense than any earlier Latin writer. That is a strong verdict from the most learned man in Visigothic Spain, and it means the work was well known in its time.

Most of it is gone. What survives, the commentary on chapters one through five and eighteen through twenty-two, comes down through a single medieval manuscript, copied in the late eleventh or early twelfth century, centuries after he wrote. The middle of the book is simply missing.

What survives is enough to show his method. He drew on Victorinus of Pettau's commentary in the edition Jerome had corrected, which makes him a link in the oldest chain of Latin readings of Revelation. But he did his own work with the seven seals. Rather than reading them as successive periods of history, he took them christologically: the seals are the incarnation, the birth, the passion, the death, the resurrection, the glory and the kingdom of Christ. The whole scroll, on that reading, is opened by the story of Jesus.

His influence outlasted his book. Beatus of Liébana, the Asturian monk whose eighth-century commentary on Revelation became the most copied and most spectacularly illustrated book in medieval Spain, used Apringius as a source. Through Beatus, a bishop in a small Portuguese town shaped how Iberian Christians pictured the end of the world for the next five hundred years.

When he died is not recorded.

Sources: Isidore of Seville, De viris illustribus; Apringius of Beja, Tractatus in Apocalypsin; Latin Commentaries on Revelation, translated by William C. Weinrich (Ancient Christian Texts).