Apollinaris Claudius

Apollinaris Claudius, also known as Apollinaris of Hierapolis or Apollinaris the Apologist, was a Christian bishop and writer of the second century. He held the see of Hierapolis in Phrygia, in the Roman province of Asia (the site of modern Pamukkale in southwestern Turkey), a church earlier associated with Papias. Surviving notices place his activity in the reign of Marcus Aurelius (161–180), to whom he addressed an apology for the Christian faith. No reliable source records his place or year of birth, his parentage, or the date and circumstances of his death. What is known of him comes almost entirely from later ecclesiastical writers, above all Eusebius of Caesarea in the Ecclesiastical History and Jerome in De Viris Illustribus.

Eusebius reports that a number of Apollinaris’s works were still extant in the early fourth century and lists those that had reached him: a discourse addressed to Marcus Aurelius; five books Against the Greeks (also described as Against the Nations); two books On Truth; two books Against the Jews; and writings composed against the Phrygian heresy, that is, Montanism. Jerome likewise states that Apollinaris flourished under Marcus Antoninus Verus, that he wrote an excellent apology for the faith, and that works against the pagans, on truth, and against the Cataphrygians were known. Photius of Constantinople later counted him among early Christian authors. Virtually all of this corpus is lost. Only titles, brief second-hand reports, and possible fragments remain, so his theology cannot be reconstructed in detail and must be inferred with caution from those notices.

Because Hierapolis lay in Phrygia, Apollinaris was geographically close to the origins of Montanism, the prophetic movement associated with Montanus and the prophetesses Prisca (Priscilla) and Maximilla in the later second century. Eusebius presents him as writing against that teaching while it was still in its beginnings. Serapion of Antioch, around the turn of the third century, cited Apollinaris among earlier authorities who had condemned the movement. Christian tradition also connects him with the so-called miracle of the Thundering Legion, an episode during Marcus Aurelius’s campaign against the Quadi in which rain was said to have saved a Roman army. Eusebius indicates that Apollinaris mentioned the event; later retellings sometimes add that Christian soldiers’ prayers brought the rain and that the emperor thereafter favored Christians. Independent evidence for an imperial edict of the kind sometimes claimed is lacking, and historians treat the political conclusions drawn from the story with reserve.

Apollinaris is venerated as a saint in the Catholic Church, with his feast observed on 8 January in the Roman Martyrology, which remembers him as bishop of Hierapolis, distinguished for holiness and learning in the time of Marcus Aurelius. He belongs to the circle of second-century apologists who defended Christianity before imperial authority and who also sought to define orthodoxy against both pagan criticism and internal dissent. He should not be confused with other early Christian figures of similar name, notably Apollinaris of Ravenna, a bishop and martyr of an earlier period, or Apollinaris of Laodicea, the fourth-century bishop whose Christological teaching was later condemned. Because his own books have not survived intact, his historical importance rests on the testimony of Eusebius, Jerome, and related compilers rather than on a recoverable body of writing.