council · 268 · Antioch
Paul of Samosata was bishop of Antioch from about 260 and was also, unusually, a civil official of Zenobia's Palmyrene administration — ducenarius, a salaried imperial post — and Eusebius' sources are as offended by the manner as by the doctrine: the raised platform in church, the applause and handkerchief-waving he encouraged, the hymns to himself in place of hymns to Christ, the women who lived in his house. The doctrine was that Jesus was a man in whom the Word dwelt, not the Word made flesh — adoptionism, and the ancestor of every later argument about whether the union is of nature or of grace. Three synods met at Antioch before the third deposed him in 268, and he simply stayed, holding the church building until Aurelian took the city in 272 and ruled, on being asked, that it belonged to whoever was in communion with the bishops of Italy and Rome. That is the first recorded appeal by Christians to a Roman emperor to settle a church dispute, and it is worth marking. The synod also rejected the term homoousios, in the sense it thought Paul meant it — leaving Nicaea to adopt the word its own predecessors had condemned.
What does it look like when a bishop is deposed and will not go?
Three synods, an emperor asked to settle it, and a word rejected that Nicaea would need.