Theodore of Mopsuestia's Hermeneutics: Transformed Theology in Response to Fourth Century Crises

Theodore of Mopsuestia (ca. 350-428), the ultimate representative of the so called Antiochene School, embodies the major theological juncture of the late fourth and early fifth centuries, responding to the persistent Arian and Apollinarian challenges and charting the new frontiers of christological con-troversies. During the last few decades, the theological and especially chris-tological views of Theodore of Mopsuestia, celebrated in the East Syrian tra-dition as „The Interpreter” (), have been studied extensively1. Given the loss of his major treatise On the Incarnation, even greater importance for reconstructing Theodore’s christology can be assigned to his Commentary on John surviving in its entirety only in Syriac2. Except for short commentaries on the minor Pauline epistles, extant in Latin3, this work is the only one to have
been fully preserved out of the numerous commentaries on almost the whole
of the New Testament penned by Theodore. While a considerable amount of
catenae Greek fragments are extant, the text in its entirety survives only in
Syriac, which may account for the relatively scant scholarly attention it has
received so far4.