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The Great Cloud of Witnesses · The Fathers & the Creeds
Hegemonius
died c. 400Patristic
The unknown author of the Acts of Archelaus, the staged debate in which a bishop argues Mani himself down before pagan judges.
Pictured: the era he stood in — The First Council of Nicaea — Vasily Surikov (1876), public domain
Summary
- Lived died c. 400.
- Stood in The Fathers & the Creeds (AD 313–600).
- Hangs on The Fathers.
- Tradition: Patristic / Eastern.
The life
Hegemonius is the name attached to a book called the Acts of Archelaus, written in the first half of the fourth century. Nothing about the man survives; the name comes from Heraclian of Chalcedon, a later writer who had read the work and knew who wrote it.
The book stages a public debate. Mani, the Persian prophet who founded Manichaeism, comes to a town in Mesopotamia and is met by the local bishop, Archelaus. They argue before a panel of judges drawn from the town, pagans, chosen as neutral. Mani loses, flees, is pursued, argues again in a second town against a priest named Diodorus, and loses again. Woven into the narrative is an account of where Mani came from and what he taught.
Historians generally judge the debate to be a literary construction rather than a transcript. What is not fiction is the doctrine. The Acts preserves the earliest and most detailed Christian description of Manichaean teaching we have: two eternal principles of Light and Darkness; matter as the work of the evil principle; light trapped in the material world and slowly rescued; Christ as a purely spiritual being who never truly had flesh; and a rejection of the Old Testament and its Creator God.
Manichaeism was not a fringe curiosity. It ran from North Africa to China and lasted a thousand years. Augustine belonged to it for nine years before he became a Christian, and much of his mature theology, on the goodness of creation, on the nature of evil as privation rather than substance, on free will, is an answer to what he had believed as a Manichee.
And nearly every Western Christian attack on Manichaeism traces back to this book. Epiphanius quoted long stretches of it in the Panarion. Cyril of Jerusalem used it. Later Latin writers used it at second and third hand. When the medieval church described dualist heresy, it was largely describing what Hegemonius had written down.
The Greek original is lost except in the fragments Epiphanius preserved. The complete text survives in an early Latin translation. Photius read it in Greek in the ninth century and described it in his library catalogue.
When Hegemonius lived, where he wrote, and when he died are all unknown.
Sources: Hegemonius, Acta Archelai (The Acts of Archelaus), translated by Mark Vermes; Epiphanius of Salamis, Panarion, 66; Photius, Bibliotheca, codex 85; Samuel N. C. Lieu, Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China.
What was happening while he lived8 moments · AD 313–600
- 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.
- c. 397–400Augustine writes the *Confessions*He told his whole story, theft, ambition, a long affair, a slow surrender, as one long prayer addressed to God. Nothing quite like it had been written before, and it invented the spiritual autobiography.
- c. 405Jerome finishes translating the Old Testament from HebrewCommissioned by Bishop Damasus in 382, Jerome worked for decades in Bethlehem, learning Hebrew so he could go behind the Greek to the original. His Latin Bible, later called the Vulgate, was the Bible of the West for a thousand years.
Go further
Read them yourself. Public-domain works are free to read in full; the rest open where the book can be found.
Search Hegemonius at the Internet Archive · every work MannaFest cites
Why this one hangs here
Preserved the record of the church's first full public argument with the followers of Mani.
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.