Malchion

Paul of Samosata was bishop of Antioch and one of the most powerful men in Syria. He held civil office under Zenobia of Palmyra at the same time, went about with a bodyguard, had a raised throne built for himself in church, and had hymns written in his own honor. He also taught that Jesus of Nazareth was a man in whom the Word of God dwelt, not God the Son made flesh, but a man indwelt and adopted.

He was also, by every account, impossible to pin down. Twice the bishops of the region came to Antioch in synod, and twice Paul talked his way out. He would say what they wanted, in words that could be read his way afterward, and the synod would break up with nothing settled.

The man who ended it was not a bishop. Malchion was a presbyter of Antioch who ran a Greek rhetorical school in the city, a professional in the technical art of argument, trained to hear where a definition had been quietly widened.

At the synod of about 268, Malchion took the floor and cross-examined him. Eusebius says he alone was able to expose the man, who otherwise concealed and dissembled. And Malchion had done one further thing: he arranged for shorthand writers to take the whole exchange down as it happened, so there could be no later argument about what Paul had said. The transcript still existed in Eusebius's day, and in Jerome's.

Under that questioning Paul finally said it plainly. The synod deposed him and wrote a circular letter to the churches, to Dionysius of Rome, to Maximus of Alexandria, and to all the provinces, explaining what had been said and done. Eusebius quotes long stretches of that letter, which was largely Malchion's work, and it is the main surviving source for the whole affair.

Paul refused to leave. He kept the church building at Antioch for four more years, backed by Zenobia. Only when the emperor Aurelian took the city in 272 did it end, and it ended in a Roman court: Aurelian ruled that the building belonged to whoever was in communion with the bishops of Italy and of Rome. Paul was put out.

Of Malchion himself almost nothing else is recorded. Jerome names him and says he taught rhetoric with distinction at Antioch and was ordained presbyter because of his excellent life. He is thought to have died around 272.

He was a schoolteacher who knew how to make a man finish a sentence.

Sources: Eusebius, Church History VII.29–30; Jerome, On Illustrious Men 71; the fragments of Malchion and the synodal letter against Paul of Samosata (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 6).