Lucian and the school of Antioch

other · 300 · Antioch

Two things came out of Lucian and they went in opposite directions. The first is textual: he produced a recension of the Septuagint, and probably of the New Testament, made by comparing manuscripts and correcting against the Hebrew — Jerome knew it as the Lucianic text and complained about it, and it became the text that Constantinople and Antioch read for the next thousand years. The second is a method. Where Alexandria read allegorically, Lucian and his pupils held to the literal and historical sense, and that instinct is the beginning of the Antiochene school. Its later flowering is Chrysostom and Theodore of Mopsuestia. Its immediate one is more awkward: Arius and Eusebius of Nicomedia were both his pupils and both called themselves fellow-Lucianists, and the Arian controversy comes out of his lecture room as directly as the Antiochene exegesis does. Nothing dates the recension, so the year here is a placing inside his teaching years rather than a record.

To establish what the text of the Bible actually said, by collating the Greek against the Hebrew rather than trusting inherited copies.

The standard Greek Bible of the Eastern churches, and a school of interpretation that would produce both Chrysostom and Arius.

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