Antipater of Bostra
Our Father among the Saints Antipater, Bishop of Bostra in Arabia
Bishop · d. late 5th century
Commemorated 13 June — Commemoration of the bishop and writer of Bostra
Antipater was Bishop — properly Metropolitan — of Bostra, the capital of the Roman province of Arabia and one of the great metropolitan sees of the Patriarchate of Antioch, in the second half of the fifth century. He is one of the very few saints of the calendar who is remembered for a book: his Refutation of the Apology for Origen answered the defence of Origen composed by Pamphilus and Eusebius of Caesarea, and set out against the Origenist system — the pre-existence of souls, the final restoration of all things, the allegorising away of the Genesis creation — with a precision that later generations found useful. The work was ordered to be read in the Eastern churches during the Origenist crisis of Justinian's reign, and the Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787 cited him as an authority; it is now lost apart from the fragments preserved in those conciliar acts. He also wrote against the Apollinarians, and a small body of his homilies survives. His life is not recounted in the Synaxaristes: what the Church keeps of him on June 13 is a name, a see, and a body of teaching.
Bostra in Arabia
Bostra (Greek Βόστρα; Arabic Bosra, in the Ḥawrān of southern Syria) was the metropolis of the Roman province of Arabia — a caravan city of black basalt at the desert edge, with a theatre, a cathedral, and a bishop of the first rank. Ecclesiastically it was a metropolitan see subject to Antioch, and its bishop ranked among the senior suffragans of the Antiochian throne, with the bishops of the Arabian towns under him. Antipater therefore belongs, like Aquilina of Byblos on the same day, to the patriarchal territory of Antioch; his is one of the Antiochian voices in the doctrinal controversies of the fifth century, and he is a saint of the Syrian church as much as of the universal calendar.
He is on record as metropolitan of Bostra by about 457 — the years in which the emperor Leo canvassed the Eastern episcopate on the authority of the Council of Chalcedon, and in which the metropolitans of the East were required to speak. He was, the accounts say, held in high esteem by his contemporaries. Nothing is transmitted of his origins, his upbringing, or his death; the year is unknown and only the late fifth century can be given.
The Refutation of the Apology for Origen
Antipater's principal work was a refutation of the Apology for Origen — the great defence of the Alexandrian written about 309 by Pamphilus of Caesarea, and completed after his martyrdom by Eusebius. The Apology was the standard case for Origen's orthodoxy, and Antipater set himself to dismantle it.
What the fragments show is a writer arguing dogmatically rather than rhetorically. He attacked in particular:
- the pre-existence of souls — the doctrine that rational souls existed before their bodies and entered them as a consequence of a prior fall;
- the apokatastasis, the final restoration of all rational creatures, including the demons, to their original blessedness;
- and Origen's allegorising of the creation narratives of Genesis, which Antipater read as dissolving the historical reality of the making of man.
These are precisely the three propositions on which the sixth-century condemnations of Origenism would turn, and it is for that reason that Antipater's book had a second life. In the Origenist crisis that reached its height around 540, when the Palestinian monasteries were divided over Origen's teaching, the Refutation was ordered to be read publicly in the churches of the East as the standing answer to it — an unusual honour for a private theological treatise, and the clearest measure of the authority his name carried.
Two and a half centuries later, at the Second Council of Nicaea (787), the Fathers ranked Antipater among the authoritative ecclesiastical writers and had passages of his work read into the acts. He did not, of course, attend; he was long dead. But it is to those conciliar acts that we owe the survival of his words at all: the Refutation itself is lost, and exists today only in the fragments quoted at Nicaea II.
Against the Apollinarians
He also composed a treatise against the Apollinarians — the followers of Apollinaris of Laodicea, who had taught that in Christ the divine Word took the place of the human rational soul. Apollinarianism had been condemned in 381, but it survived in Syria into the fifth century, and its writings, circulated under orthodox names, were among the sources of the Monophysite controversy of Antipater's own lifetime. This work too is lost, and is known only from brief fragments.
The homilies
A small homiletic corpus travels under his name, and here alone something of his own voice is preserved. Two complete sermons are securely transmitted — one on the Annunciation and one on St John the Baptist; the latter is a natural subject for a bishop of the province in which the Forerunner preached and died. In Armenian translation there survive, further, four homilies on the Nativity of Christ, and pieces on the Visitation, the Theophany and the Dormition of the Mother of God are attributed to him. The authenticity of much of this material is uncertain, as is usual with the homiletic collections; the Annunciation and John the Baptist homilies are the two that are ordinarily accepted.
Feast and commemoration
June 13 (church date; New Calendar civil June 13; Old Calendar civil June 26). He is carried by the Greek enumeration of the day — Ἅγιος Ἀντίπατρος ἐπίσκοπος Βόστρων — and by the OCA, and stands third or fourth in the day's title after Aquilina of Byblos and Triphyllius of Leucosia. No proper service is appointed for him; where he is kept, it is by commemoration at the synaxarion reading and by the common of a hierarch. Depending on the date of Pascha, June 13 may fall before the Apostles' Fast or within it — the fast begins on the Monday after the Sunday of All Saints and so has no fixed start — and the day's position is therefore not asserted here.
His see, Bosra, lies today in the Ḥawrān of southern Syria within the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of Ḥawrān; the ancient cathedral of Bostra still stands in ruin. He is one of a small group of Arabian and Syrian hierarch-writers of the fifth century whose commemoration the calendars preserve without a Life.
Hymns
Apolytikion — Tone 4 (common of a hierarch)
O God of our fathers, who dealest with us ever according to Thy gentleness: take not Thy mercy from us, but by the prayers of Thy hierarch Antipater, guide our life in peace.
Iconography
No traditional iconography specific to Antipater is known, and no image of him has been located: he is a calendar name without a synaxarion Life, and such saints are very rarely painted. Where he would be depicted — in a menologion row for June, or among the Arabian and Syrian hierarchs — he would take the ordinary hierarch type: standing in phelonion and omophorion, the right hand blessing and the Gospel book in the left, in middle age with a short beard, inscribed Ο ΑΓΙΟΣ ΑΝΤΙΠΑΤΡΟΣ. Because he is remembered for his writing, a scroll or codex in place of the Gospel would be an appropriate and traditional variant, of the kind used for the hierarch-authors.
No pre-1900 image of him has been found for this collection. Searches under his Greek and English names return only the martyr Antipater of the Cyzicene company and the ruins of Bostra, and no candidate was stored.
Disputed questions
- No synaxarion Life. It must be said plainly that Antipater's life is not found in the Synaxaristes. He has no passion, no miracle-cycle, no transmitted biography. He entered the calendars as an ecclesiastical writer of established authority whose memory the Church chose to keep, and the entry above is therefore a bibliography rather than a Life. That is an honest limit of the record, not a gap to be filled.
- The date of his repose. Only "the second half of the fifth century" can be supported. Any precise year given for him in modern lists is a conjecture.
- Bishop or metropolitan. Both styles are correct: Bostra was a metropolitan see, and Greek sources call him ἐπίσκοπος Βόστρων while modern reference works call him metropolitan. This entry keeps bishop, the calendars' own style.
- Not to be confused with the martyr Antipater numbered among the Nine Martyrs of Cyzicus (April 29), an entirely different person of an earlier age and no relation to Arabia; nor with Antipater the fourth-century sophist, nor with the Herodian Antipaters of the Gospel period, whose name the see's Greek form Βόστρων does nothing to distinguish.
- Not the same as Titus of Bostra, the fourth-century bishop of the same see and author against the Manichaeans; the two are sometimes confused in bibliographies of Arabian episcopal writers.