Exegete" of the early Church, as Theodoret is the Annotator and Chrysostom the Homilist. His merits are so conspicuous that Theodoret does not shrink from calling him "The Master of the whole Church."

1

For Theodore was a man "of bold independence and masculine sagacity;" a leader of thought; a writer of rare acumen, of fearless honesty, of prodigious industry, of ardent sincerity, of unquestionable power. He was a Voice not an Echo; a Voice amid thousands of echoes which repeated only the emptiest sounds. He rejected the theories of Origen, but he had learnt from him the indispensable importance of attention to linguistic details especially in commenting on the New Testament.2 He pays close attention to particles, moods, prepositions, and to terminology in general. He points out the idiosyncrasies (idipara) of St. Paul's style. He is almost the earliest writer who gives much attention to Hermeneutic matter, as for instance in his Introductions to the Epistles to Ephesus and Colossae. He enters into such. collateral questions as Church organisation, early ecclesiastical history, the condition of slaves and women in the heathen world, and adds to the interest of his treatment by references to contemporary matters such as sacerdotal arrogance, false liberalism, and the spirit of persecution. His highest merit is his constant endeavour to study each. passage as a whole and not as "an isolated congeries of separate texts." He first considers the sequence of thought, then examines the phraseology and the separate clauses, and finally furnishes us with an exegesis which is often brilliantly characteristic and profoundly suggestive.

But his crowning merit was the original yet unhappily fruitless stand which he made against the subtle fascination

1 Linguistic, but unfortunately not historical or geographical. Questions about Tarshish, Bothrus (1.XX. for TP Am. ix. 7), &c., he flings aside as περιττὴ ἀκριβολογία.

2

Ambrose says that Origen was "longe minor in Novo Testamento," but in spite of prolixity he is in fact better as a New Testament than as an Old Testament exegete, and his notes on the use of words (John i. 3; iv. 25, 44, &c.) are often excellent. See Dr. Sanday in Expositor, xi. 371.

3 Questions as to

"Quis, quid, ubi, quibus auspiciis, cur, quomodo, quando."

of Origenising allegory.1 Part of the bitterness with which his memory was persecuted was due to the anger of the Origenists against him for the treatise which he had written to refute their principles.2 The Syrian school held that the Scriptures are the basis of knowledge, and not either the esoteric Gnosis to which the Alexandrians had attached so much importance, nor the ecclesiastical tradition to which Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Cyprian had appealed. They were the Reformers, the Protestants, the Puritans, of the Ancient Church. Origen had held that the Old and New Testaments were equally important; the Antiochenes had realised the vast difference which separates them. They recognised that the "grace of superintendency" (evdoxía), which they attributed to the Old Testament writers, admitted of degrees. They denied, and rightly denied, that the Jews had anything approaching to a real knowledge of such truths as the Trinity and the Incarnation. Theodore understood the Psalms in their historic sense, and, while he by no means denied their typical applicability, he was attacked by Leontius of Byzantium, and called a Judaiser, just as Calvin was in later times, because he referred them primarily to Hezekiah and Zerubbabel, and only allowed that three Psalms were directly Messianic. He pointed out that the Song of Solomon does not once mention the name of God, and, like many eminent moderns, he rejected its mystic application. In the ninth chapter of Zechariah (8-10) he thought it an instance of frigid and foolish interpretation (ἀνοίας τῆς ἐσχάτης) to

3

1 See the excellent remarks of Sieffert, Theod. Mops. V. T. sobrie interpretandi vindex, 1827, and Munter, De Schola Antiochena, 1811. The monograph of Fritzsche, De Theod. Mops. Vita et Scriptis (1836), is printed in Migne's Patrologia, vol. lxvi.

2 Facundus of Hermiane (Def. Triun. Capit. iii. 6) cites a treatise of his, De Allegoria et Historia, in five books, and mentions the odium which it excited. Ebedjesu (Assemanni, iii. 34) also alludes to this.

3 Leont. Byzant. adv. Eutych. iii. c. 11. "Omnes psalmos judaice ad Zorobabalem et Ezechiam retulit, tribus tantum [viii. xlv. ex.] ad Dominum rejectis." Facundus defends him very properly by saying that he did not dispute the applicability of all Messianic prophecy, and that there was no crime in the moral interpretation of the Psalms. And Theodore at least assigned reasons for his views. He could not allow Ps. xxii. to be exclusively Messianic, because in verse 1 the Septuagint has "my transgressions." He is said to have written this commentary on the Psalms at the age of eighteen.

Theodore of Mopsuestia.

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apply one clause historically and another allegorically, to refer one to Zerubbabel, the next to Christ, and then to go back again to Zerubbabel. He rightly refuses to read the latest revelations into the earliest utterances,-to see the doctrine of the Trinity in the first verse of Genesis, and the three spies of Exodus; of Redemption in Rahab's red cord; of the Resurrection in the law of levirate marriage; or of the evangelisation of the heathen in the Ethiopian wife of Moses. He stood his ground on the doctrine of Unity of Sense, and he deduced the sense on secure principles from the context, from the general laws of language, and from the usages of the particular writer.

Another of his conspicuous merits is this, that he had grasped the difference which separates the Jewish from the Alexandrian theory of inspiration, a difference which fundamentally affected the methods of the two schools. To some of the ablest thinkers among the Jews inspiration was ethical in its character; it consisted in the dilatation and ennoblement of the individual consciousness. To the Alexandrians, misled by Plato, inspiration was pathological; it consisted in a trance, and depression of the individual consciousness. The difference is that which also separates the ecstasy of Montanists from the inspired Christian preaching, to which the Apostles give the name of "prophecy." The different theories led to different methods of interpretation. The Alexandrian theory furnished the pretext for allegory-that is, for making the writers say something other than what they did say. The better Jewish theory, purified in Christianity, takes the teachings of the Old Dispensation literally, but sees in them, as did St. Paul, the shadow and germ of future developments. Allegory, though once used by St. Paul by way of passing illustration, is unknown to the other Apostles, and is never sanctioned by Christ. But Christ Himself, as in the case of Jonah, and of the Brazen Serpent, sanctioned the use of types. The

1 It is surely needless to point out the absolute difference between parabolic teaching and allegorical interpretation.

1

allegoric method triumphed from the days of Origen onwards. The true grasp of typology ceased from the fifth to the seventeenth century-from the days of Theodore to those of Cocceius.

It must not be supposed that Theodore rejected the whole argument from Prophecy. He neither accused the Apostles of error in their Old Testament references; nor did he deny the progressive and providential governance of God in the History of the World. He held that the essence of Old Testament prophecy lay rather in an inspired hope than in conscious vaticination; that Israel was under the special care (xndeμovía) of God, and that God prophesies by deeds rather than by words. Hence he believed that the relation of the Old to the New Testament lay mainly in the homology of facts due to a sort of pre-established harmony; that by God's divine administration (oikovoμía) the facts were themselves a dim revelation of the future, and that the Prophets were led by divine inspiration to express what they saw in larger terms (ὑπερβολικώτερον) than would have been warranted by contemporary circumstances.1 It is on this principle that he explains the applications of the New Testament writers. He sees as clearly as we do that they are not proofs in the modern sense of the word, but rather illustrative applications which would have been specially valuable to those who had been trained in the methods on which they depended. There can be no better indication of the fine original genius of Theodore than the fact that in these conclusions, without any aid from the immense apparatus of subsequently-accumulated

See Theod. Mops. Praef. in Jon.; Merx, Joel, p. 127, fg. Delitzsch on Ps. xxii. He held that the Prophets did not see distinctly, but had parraclar τινα τῶν μελλόντων.

2 The phrases he uses closely resemble those of Calvin. If Calvin says that the sacred writers "apply" this or that passage to Christ, "pid deflectione," so Theodore says of Heb. x. 5, that the passage quoted was originally applicable to the Jewish exiles, but that the writer altered the reading from ria to σῶμα (μεταλλάξας οὖν αὐτὴν ὡς ἐκ προσώπου τοῦ Χριστοῦ ταύτῃ φησιν ἀντὶ τοῦ ὠτία, σῶμα). He uses the words συγχρῇσθαι, καταχρῆσθαι, of the use made of Amos ix. 11, Is. xlv. 23, in Rom. xiv. 11; and defends such quotations on the ground that what was said of the Divine nature generally might be applied to the Son or the Holy Spirit.

thought, he anticipated by fourteen hundred years many of the accepted conclusions of modern days.

3. It is a matter of profound regret that, in the Western Church especially, the influence of Theodore was totally destroyed by the charge of Nestorianism.1 In the Syrian Church, indeed, he produced a profound impression. His views were, to a certain extent, perpetuated by THEODORET, who depended almost entirely on Theodore and Chrysostom, whom he calls luminaries of the world. But Theodoret († 457), though safer and more terse, drew back from the advanced position of Theodore, and was wholly inferior to him in genius, courage, and literary power.2 Theodore paid a terrible penalty for having been born in an age too soon. His aberrations from traditional dogma brought him into suspicion, and "a century later a pigmy generation anathematised exegetes, who were already half forgotten."3 But his merits. have been recognised in later days, and the stream of truth, having flowed for centuries in its subterranean course, once more emerged at the Reformation into regions of light and day.

4. The great Cappadocian triumvirate, BASIL THE GREAT, GREGORY OF NYSSA, "the Theologian," and GREGORY OF

1 Among Theodore's predecessors might have been mentioned Aphraates, Eusebius of Emesa, and possibly Adrianus: among his successors his younger brother Polychronius Bishop of Apamea († 430) and Severianus Bishop of Gabala (see Schröck, x. 458, Cave, i. 375).

2 On Theodoret see Schröck, xviii. 398 sq.; Rosenmüller, iv. 93; Merx, Joel, p. 147, fg. Lightfoot, Galatians, p. 226. There is a monograph by Richter, De Theodoreto Ep. Paulin. interprete, 1822; and another by Specht, Der exegetische Standpunkt Theodor's und Theodoret's.

On Theodore's writings, of which we now possess some complete works in the original, see Fritzsche, De Theod. Mops. Vita et scriptis, Halae, 1836. Ernesti, Opusc. Theol. 502; Sieffert, Theod. Mops. V. Test. sobrie interpretandi vinder, 1827; Diestel, pp. 129-133; Merx, Joel, pp. 110-141; and the excellent introduction of the Rev. H. B. Swete to the edition of his Commentaries on the Epistles of St. Paul. The savage attack on him by Leontius may be read in Gallandi, Bibl. Patr. xii. 686 (Libidinose pro sua et mente et lingua meretricia interpretatus, sua supra modum incredibili audacia ex libris sacris abscidit," &c.). The style of the theological criticism of partisans was as violent and vulgar then as it has always been. It is to be feared, however, that Theodore in part provoked it by his own stinging expressions. For notices of the writers of the Antiochene School in general, see Rosenmüller, iii. 250. The merits of Theodore have been fully admitted by Merx (Joel, pp. 110-141), Bishop Lightfoot (Galatians, p. 220), and Dr. Sanday (Expositor, vol. xi.).

3 Reuss, Gesch. § 521.