Titus of Bostra

Titus was bishop of Bostra, the capital of the Roman province of Arabia, in what is now southern Syria. He was in office by 362 and died about 378. Jerome lists him among the Christian writers and says he was a man of vigorous mind.

He walks into the record through a confrontation with an emperor. Julian, the nephew of Constantine who abandoned Christianity and tried to restore the old religion, wrote to the people of Bostra in 362 complaining about their bishop. Julian's letter, which survives, quotes Titus as having written to the emperor that the Christians of the city were as numerous as the pagans but were being restrained by their clergy from disorder. Julian chose to read that as an admission that the Christian population was a mob barely held in check, and told the Bostrans to expel their bishop for it. The city did not.

His major work is Against the Manichaeans, in four books, written probably in the 360s. Manichaeism was the most serious rival Christianity faced in the East in that century, a dualist religion taught by the Persian prophet Mani, holding that matter is the product of an evil principle eternally opposed to the good, that the body is a prison, and that the God of the Old Testament is not the Father of Christ.

Titus answers it head on, and he answers it as a philosopher would. He argues that evil is not a substance and has no maker of its own; that what men call the evils of the world, pain, hardship, wild animals, death, are either good things misused or corrective goods; that free will is real and that moral evil comes from it, not from the material of the body. He goes through the objections one by one, including the argument from the suffering of animals, and he defends the Old Testament at length against Manichaean ridicule, refusing to let the two Testaments be split apart.

The first two and a half books survive in Greek; the rest survives in an early Syriac translation, made in 411, which is one of the oldest dated Syriac manuscripts of any Christian work. Modern editors work from both.

He also wrote homilies and a commentary on Luke, which survives in catena fragments.

Why he still matters is the argument, not the biography. The claim that the physical world is a mistake, that spirit is good and matter is not, keeps coming back, in the ancient world as Manichaeism and Gnosticism, and in every century since under other names. Titus wrote the fullest early Christian reply, and it rests on the first page of Genesis: God made it, and God said it was good.

Sources: Titus of Bostra, Contra Manichaeos (Greek and Syriac text ed. Roman-Cyrille Fernàndez and others, Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca 82); Julian, Letter to the People of Bostra; Jerome, De viris illustribus 102; Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History.