Oecumenius

Oecumenius wrote the earliest Greek commentary on the book of Revelation that has come down to us. He wrote it in the first half of the sixth century, most likely in the 530s or 540s.

The man himself is hard to see. For a long time the name was attached to a tenth-century compiler of biblical catenae, and older reference books call the commentator 'Oecumenius of Trikka,' a bishop in Thessaly. That identification does not hold. The best current view is that the author was a layman, a rhetorician of high education writing in the reign of Justinian, probably the same Oecumenius who corresponded with Severus of Antioch, which would put him among the Christians who could not accept the Council of Chalcedon. His commentary treats the person of Christ in ways that fit that setting.

The text itself was lost for centuries. It survived only inside later Greek compilations and was not recovered as a whole work until 1901, when the American scholar Franz Hoskier identified and published it from manuscripts. Before that, the oldest Greek commentary on Revelation anyone could read was that of Andrew of Caesarea, written a little later and partly in response to it.

What Oecumenius does with Revelation is worth knowing. He is not a literalist about the millennium; he reads much of the book as an account of what Christ has already accomplished and of the church's life between the first and second comings, using allegory freely. The seals, the trumpets, the woman clothed with the sun, he takes them as pictures of the incarnation, the church, and the trials of the present age rather than as a timetable of things yet to come.

The thousand years he understands as the period from the incarnation onward, not as a coming earthly reign. Where a modern premillennial reader will disagree with him at nearly every turn, the value of the book is that it shows how one educated Greek Christian of the sixth century actually handled the last book of the Bible, and how contested its reading already was.

He also shows how hard-won Revelation's place in the canon was in the East. The Greek church had argued about the book for centuries; the Syriac churches largely left it out; and Oecumenius writes as a man defending its worth as well as explaining it.

Andrew of Caesarea, writing his own commentary at Caesarea in Cappadocia shortly afterward, pushed back on Oecumenius's readings at many points, and it was Andrew's work, not this one, that the Byzantine world went on to copy and read. Oecumenius survives as the older witness, brought back into the light after fourteen hundred years.

Sources: Oecumenius, Commentary on the Apocalypse (Greek text ed. Marc De Groote; English translation by John N. Suggit, Fathers of the Church, volume 112); H. C. Hoskier, The Complete Commentary of Oecumenius on the Apocalypse (1928); Andrew of Caesarea, Commentary on the Apocalypse.