Pope Zephyrinus

Zephyrinus was bishop of Rome from about 199 to 217, eighteen years, one of the longest terms of the early church, and one of the most contested.

He took the chair as the persecution under Septimius Severus was beginning, and he led the Roman congregation through a stretch when the hardest pressure was not from outside but from inside. In those eighteen years, one after another, the great early controversies about the person of Christ arrived in Rome and had to be dealt with.

There were the adoptionists, Theodotus the Cobbler and his circle, later Artemon, who taught that Jesus was a man on whom power came at his baptism. A writer of the time, quoted by Eusebius, describes them correcting the manuscripts of Scripture to fit and disagreeing with each other's corrections. They persuaded a confessor named Natalius to become their bishop for a salary; the story ends with Natalius weeping in sackcloth at Zephyrinus's feet, begging to be let back in.

There was the opposite error, modalism, taught at Rome by Praxeas and Sabellius, that Father and Son are one person under two names, so that the Father himself suffered on the cross. Tertullian, writing from Carthage, said Praxeas had done the devil two favors in Rome at once: he drove out prophecy and brought in heresy.

There was Montanism, with Proclus arguing its case in Rome against the presbyter Caius. There was Tertullian himself breaking with the church over rigor.

And there was the internal quarrel that outlived him. The presbyter Hippolytus judged Zephyrinus unequal to all of it, and said so in writing: he calls him an ignorant and unlettered man, accuses him of greed, and says the deacon Callistus led him around and made the real decisions. That verdict is the main surviving source on Zephyrinus, and it comes from a man who lost the election to Callistus and set himself up as a rival bishop. It is testimony from one side of a fight.

What can be said from the outside is that the Roman church came through those eighteen years intact, with the adoptionists put out, the modalists checked, and the great cemetery on the Appian Way established under Callistus's care.

Zephyrinus died in 217. He was buried in a chamber of his own above the Catacomb of Callixtus, and the Roman church honored him as a martyr, though the persecution had eased well before his death.

Sources: Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies IX (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5); Eusebius, Church History V.28, VI.20–21; Tertullian, Against Praxeas; the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia, article Pope St. Zephyrinus.