Theodore of Heraclea

Theodore was bishop of Heraclea in Thrace, the old Perinthus, on the north shore of the Sea of Marmara, on the road west out of Constantinople. He was appointed sometime between 328 and 334 and died about 355.

He was one of the leading figures of what historians call the Eusebian alliance: the party of bishops, gathered originally around Eusebius of Nicomedia and Eusebius of Caesarea, who resisted the way the Council of Nicaea's language was being used. They are usually filed under 'Arian,' and that label does more harm than good in his case. Theodore's surviving pages are not concerned with defending Arius.

They are concerned with refuting Marcellus of Ancyra, who had pressed the unity of God so hard that the Son looked to his opponents like a temporary extension of the Father rather than a distinct person. That fight, over whether the Son has his own real subsistence, is what shaped Theodore's writing, and it does not fit neatly on either side of the later Nicene-Arian divide.

He was present at the major councils of the middle of the century. He was at Antioch in 341, at the divided council of Serdica in 343, where the Eastern bishops withdrew and held their own session, and he was one of the envoys sent to the western emperor Constans to argue the Eastern case. He was among the bishops who deposed Athanasius, and Athanasius names him in his lists of opponents.

Jerome, in his catalogue of Christian writers, says Theodore wrote commentaries on Matthew, on John, on the Epistles, and on the Psalms, and that he published them in the reign of Constantius. Not one survives whole. What is left are fragments, hundreds of them, quoted in the Byzantine catenae, the medieval chain-compilations that gathered excerpts from many commentators under each verse. Editors have been reassembling him out of those chains for over a century.

The fragments show a plain, brisk exegete, closer to the Antiochene manner than to Alexandrian allegory, who explains what a verse says and moves on. Later readers who had no idea of his church politics went on copying him because the explanations were useful, and some catenae preserve his comments under other men's names.

He is a reminder of two things at once. The first is how much of fourth-century biblical exposition has been lost, and how much of what survives survives only because anthologists cut it up. The second is that the men on the losing side of the Arian controversy were not all propagandists; some of them spent their working lives explaining the Gospels to congregations.

Sources: Jerome, De viris illustribus 90; the catena fragments of Theodore in Joseph Reuss, Matthäus-Kommentare aus der griechischen Kirche and Johannes-Kommentare aus der griechischen Kirche; Athanasius, Apologia contra Arianos and Historia Arianorum; Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History.