Theodotus of Ancyra

Theodotus was bishop of Ancyra in Galatia, modern Ankara, in the first half of the fifth century. He was in office by 431 and died before 446.

He had known Nestorius well. The sources indicate an earlier friendship, and Theodotus himself speaks of the pain of the break. When Nestorius became patriarch of Constantinople in 428 and began objecting to the title Theotokos, God-bearer, for the Virgin, Theodotus did not follow him.

At the Council of Ephesus in the summer of 431 he was among the bishops who acted with Cyril of Alexandria. He was one of those formally deputed to hear the case, and he testified in the sessions about what Nestorius had said in private conversation, evidence that carried weight precisely because the two men had been close. Nestorius was deposed. The Eastern bishops under John of Antioch, arriving late, held their own council and deposed Cyril in return, and the empire spent two years sorting out the wreck.

Theodotus preached at Ephesus during the council itself, and two of those homilies survive: one on the Nativity delivered while the bishops were assembled, and one on the mother of God. They are set-piece festal sermons, rich and rhetorical, and they are among the earliest fully developed Marian preaching in Greek.

His longer works are doctrinal. He wrote a six-book refutation of Nestorius, which is lost apart from fragments quoted at later councils, and an Exposition of the Nicene Creed, which survives, a clause-by-clause commentary that argues the case for the one Christ, God and man, without the technical machinery the next generation would build. He also left a discourse on the Nativity and other homiletic pieces, some preserved only in Syriac.

His theology is Cyrilline: the emphasis falls on the unity of the person, on the fact that the one who was born of Mary is the very Word of God, and therefore on the propriety of calling her Theotokos. He argues it mostly from Scripture and from the church's practice of worship rather than from philosophical categories, which is part of why the homilies read well.

Because his lost works were quoted at the later councils, fragments of him survive embedded in the acts of Chalcedon and in the florilegia, the collected proof-texts that both sides of the christological argument assembled from earlier fathers. That is how a fair amount of fifth-century writing has come down: not as books, but as evidence.

He was still alive in 438; the date of his death is not recorded exactly, only that it came before 446. Both the Eastern Orthodox and the Roman Catholic churches honour him, and his feast is kept in the East on 18 May.

Sources: Theodotus of Ancyra, Homilies and Expositio symboli Nicaeni (Migne, Patrologia Graeca 77; Patrologia Orientalis 19 for the Syriac); the Acts of the Council of Ephesus (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series volume 14); Johannes Quasten, Patrology.