PHILOXENUS OF MABBOUG

PHILOXENUS OF MABBOUG, bishop (ca. 440–523). A leader of the opposition to the Council of Chalcedon (q.v.) and one of the most able theologians of his day, Philoxenus was bishop of Mabboug (also Mabbug or Hierapolis) in northern Syria from 485 until his deposition by Emperor Justin in 519. Together with Severus of Antioch (q.v.), he was perhaps the most influential of non-Chalcedonian writers in his own day and thereafter. Originally a student at the school of theology in Edessa (q.v.), an institution dominated by the exegetical and theological works of Theodore of Mopsuestia (q.v.), he broke with the latter’s extreme dyophysitism and embraced the Christology of Cyril of Alexandria (qq.v.), to which he remained faithful the rest of his life. He wrote exclusively in Syriac, and is perhaps the earliest translator of Evagrius of Pontus (q.v.), although his translation was also a work of careful editing. He wrote extensively on the spiritual life, especially his thirteen “Discourses on the Christian Life,” in addition to polemical treatises and commentaries on the Scriptures (q.v.). The Philoxenian version of the New Testament is the one prepared in Syriac for Philoxenus in 508, but unlike the Peshitta contains all the Catholic epistles and Rev. The original was lost in the revision by Thomas of Harkel in 616.