Hesychius of Jerusalem

Hesychius was a priest and monk of Jerusalem in the first half of the fifth century. Cyril of Scythopolis, writing a century later, describes him as a great teacher of the church there and places him in the circle around the Jerusalem bishops and the monasteries of the Judean desert. He was ordained in Jerusalem, preached in its churches, and is thought to have died some time after 450.

He was, by the ancient testimony, an enormously productive commentator. He worked through book after book of Scripture, not selecting favorite passages, but going verse by verse from beginning to end. Leviticus, Job, the Psalms, Isaiah, Ezekiel and the Twelve Prophets are all credited to him.

Leviticus is the striking one. It is the book modern readers skip, and Hesychius wrote a full commentary on it, reading the sacrifices, the priesthood and the purity laws as a sustained anticipation of Christ. That commentary survives in Latin. Scholars have long argued over whether the Latin text is really his, since it follows the Vulgate rather than the Greek Old Testament, and some assign it instead to a later Latin writer of similar name. The argument is unsettled.

His annotations on the Psalms are more securely his. They circulated for centuries under the name of Athanasius, and were reassigned to Hesychius by modern scholarship, one more case of a working exegete's labor surviving under a bigger name.

He also composed a harmony of the four Gospels, arranging the parallel accounts of the Passion and Resurrection so that a reader could see how they fit, and he wrote homilies for the feasts of the church year, several of them for the Virgin Mary, and one for James the brother of the Lord and David, kept together in the Jerusalem liturgy.

Most of what he wrote is lost or scattered. Fragments of him turn up constantly in the catenae, the medieval chains of commentary that string quotations from many fathers along the biblical text; twentieth-century scholars have been recovering more of him from those manuscripts and from Latin translations for decades.

He is worth knowing for what he represents. Beside the councils and the controversies, a priest in Jerusalem spent his life explaining the whole Bible to a congregation, including the parts nobody asks about.

Sources: Cyril of Scythopolis, Lives of the Monks of Palestine; Hesychius of Jerusalem, Commentarius in Leviticum (Patrologia Graeca 93); The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), s.v. "Hesychius of Jerusalem"; Henry Wace, Dictionary of Christian Biography, s.v. "Hesychius (25)".