Theodore of Mopsuestia

Theodore was born about 350 at Antioch in Syria, into a wealthy family. He studied rhetoric and literature under Libanius, the most celebrated pagan teacher of the age, alongside a fellow student named John, the man the church would later call Chrysostom.

The two friends went together into the ascetic community of Diodore of Tarsus. Theodore then left it, intending to marry and go back to the law. John wrote him two letters begging him to return, and he did.

He was ordained priest at Antioch about 383 and made bishop of Mopsuestia in Cilicia about 392. He held that see for thirty-six years and died in 428, honoured, at peace, and with a reputation across the East as the master interpreter of Scripture.

He wrote commentaries on most of the Bible. His method was the Antiochene one, pressed further than anyone before him: find out what the human author was actually saying to his own time, in his own circumstances, and start there. He treated the historical books as history, tracked the argument of Paul's letters clause by clause, and refused to turn every Old Testament detail into a hidden allegory of Christ. He held that only a small number of Psalms were directly messianic and read the rest as the words of David or of Israel in real situations. He questioned the canonicity of some books, thought the Song of Songs a marriage poem, and treated Job's frame narrative as a literary composition.

What he wrote on the incarnation was equally distinct. To protect the reality of Christ's humanity, a real human mind, a real human will, tested and obedient, he spoke of the Word 'indwelling' the man Jesus, and of one person formed from two natures. His critics said that this left two sons rather than one.

He was not condemned in his lifetime. But his pupil Nestorius was, at Ephesus in 431, three years after Theodore's death, and from then on Theodore's writings were read backward through that condemnation. In 553 the Second Council of Constantinople anathematised his person and his works as the first of the Three Chapters, in an attempt to reconcile the churches that had rejected Chalcedon. His Greek books were destroyed almost completely.

They survived elsewhere. The Church of the East, in Persia and beyond, had already taken him as its standard authority, and calls him simply the Interpreter. Syriac translations of his commentary on John, his catechetical homilies, and much else were preserved there, and a Latin version of his commentaries on the shorter letters of Paul came through in the West under another man's name. Scholars recovering him in the last century have argued that the condemned Theodore and the actual Theodore are not the same man, and that much of the case against him rested on excerpts taken out of context.

Sources: Theodore of Mopsuestia, Commentary on the Gospel of John and Catechetical Homilies (English translations by Marco Conti and by A. Mingana, Woodbrooke Studies); the Acts of the Second Council of Constantinople (553); Johannes Quasten, Patrology; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church.