Theophilus

Saint Theophilus of Antioch was a Christian bishop and apologist of the later second century, identified by Eusebius of Caesarea and by Jerome as the sixth bishop of Antioch after the apostle Peter. Almost nothing about his birth, family, or education can be fixed from contemporary evidence. In his only surviving work he presents himself as a former pagan who was brought to Christian belief by reading the sacred writings, above all the prophetic books. Later writers have sometimes placed his origins near the Tigris and Euphrates on the strength of geographical remarks in that apology, but the inference is uncertain and no ancient source names a birthplace. He succeeded Bishop Eros in the see of Antioch, already one of the principal churches of the Roman East, during the reigns of Marcus Aurelius and Commodus. In his own day he was known as bishop of that church; the later title of patriarch was not yet in use for the Antiochene bishops.

His reputation as a writer rests on the three books To Autolycus (Ad Autolycum), an apology in Greek addressed to a pagan interlocutor. The work defends the Christian doctrine of God against Greco-Roman mythology and imperial cult, argues for the resurrection of the body and for a final judgment, and offers a chronology meant to show that biblical history is older than the Greek literary tradition. In the second book Theophilus uses the Greek word trias of God, the Word, and Wisdom, and he is commonly cited as the earliest Christian author whose extant text employs that term, though his language is not the later Nicene doctrine of three coequal persons. He develops a Logos theology in which the Word is first immanent in God and then expressed for creation and revelation. Internal evidence, including a chronology that reaches the death of Marcus Aurelius, shows that at least the third book was composed after 180.

Eusebius and Jerome ascribe to him other writings that have not survived: a work against the heresy of Hermogenes, treatises against Marcion, catechetical books, and some form of commentary or harmony on the Gospels which Jerome judged not without value. None of these lost works can be reconstructed with any confidence, and no letters or conciliar acts from his episcopate remain. The date of his death is not recorded; episcopal lists and the terminus of his chronology have led historians to place it in the early 180s, but the year itself is unknown. No reliable account of his burial, manner of death, or family circumstances has been preserved.

He was entered in the Roman Martyrology on 13 October, with the notice that he occupied the chair of Antioch as sixth from Peter. Some Eastern calendars have also kept his memory, occasionally under other dates. He was venerated from antiquity rather than raised to the altars by a later formal process, and no historically secure list of patronages is attached to his name. His importance for later theology lies less in any institutional career than in the accident that Ad Autolycum survived, giving a rare second-century voice from the church of Antioch on God, the Word, creation, and the reading of Scripture against pagan culture.