Philoxenus of Mabbug

Philoxenus was born about 440 at Tahal, in the Persian province of Beth Garmai, east of the Tigris, outside the Roman empire altogether. His Syriac name was Aksenaya; Philoxenus is the Greek form. He studied at the famous school of Edessa, the great Syriac academy, at a time when it was divided over how to speak about the person of Christ.

He came down firmly on the side that rejected the Council of Chalcedon's formula of two natures, holding instead to Cyril of Alexandria's language of the one incarnate nature of God the Word. That position governed his whole career.

In 485 the patriarch Peter the Fuller made him bishop of Mabbug, the old Hierapolis, in Syria, and he held the see for more than thirty years. He was a formidable operator: he pressed the removal of bishops he judged Chalcedonian, worked closely with Severus of Antioch, and secured imperial backing under the emperor Anastasius, who shared his theology. When Justin I came to the throne in 518 with the opposite policy, Philoxenus was deposed and exiled, first to Philippopolis in Thrace, then to Gangra in Paphlagonia. He died there in 523. The Syriac accounts say he was shut in a room above a kitchen and suffocated by the smoke, and his church has always counted him a martyr.

Two things he did outlast the politics.

The first is a Bible. Philoxenus judged the standard Syriac New Testament, the Peshitta, insufficiently exact against the Greek, and in 507 or 508 he commissioned his chorepiscopus Polycarp to make a fresh translation. The result, the Philoxenian version, was the first Syriac New Testament to include the books the Peshitta had left out, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation. It survives only in fragments and in what later revisers took over from it, but it changed the Syriac canon.

The second is the Thirteen Discourses on the Christian Life, written for monks and among the finest things in Syriac prose. They work through faith, simplicity, the fear of God, poverty, greed, gluttony, and lust, in that order, not as a list of rules but as a description of how a person changes. His theme is that the Christian life is a second birth that has to grow, and that most people stall at the beginning because they will not let go of what they own or what they eat. He writes long, patient, concrete paragraphs, and he is very hard to argue with.

He also left commentaries on Matthew, Luke, and John, many letters, and liturgical pieces still used in the Syriac Orthodox church, which honours him as one of its principal fathers.

Sources: Philoxenus of Mabbug, The Discourses (English translation by E. A. Wallis Budge, 1894) and his Letters; Bar Hebraeus, Chronicon Ecclesiasticum; Sebastian Brock, The Bible in the Syriac Tradition; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia.