Introduction

Saint Theophylact, Archbishop of Ochrid and all Bulgaria (ca. 1050 – after 1120), ranks among the most productive biblical commentators of the Byzantine world. Born at Euripus, on the strait separating the island of Euboea from the Greek mainland, he came to Constantinople as a young man and there studied under the leading teachers of rhetoric and philosophy of the age, among them Michael Psellos, the foremost Neoplatonist of the day and the dominant intellectual presence in the capital. Psellos’s instruction left its mark: Theophylact’s writings show a mind fully at home in the vocabulary of classical Greek learning, but one that keeps that vocabulary firmly in the service of Scripture rather than speculative philosophy. In one of his own letters he calls himself a true Constantinopolitan, and by every account he was, for the first half of his life, thoroughly a man of the capital.

His gifts carried him quickly into the service of the Great Church. He was ordained deacon at Hagia Sophia and rose to the senior teaching post of rhetorician in the patriarchal school, a position at the intellectual center of Byzantine ecclesiastical life. His reputation for eloquence brought him into the orbit of the imperial court, where he became tutor to Constantine, the young son of the Empress Maria of Alania and heir presumptive under Emperor Michael VII Doukas; for that charge he composed a treatise on the upbringing of a Christian ruler. He was, in short, a cultivated courtier and scholar entirely at home among the libraries and the splendor of the capital—and it is worth holding this picture in mind, because almost everything he is remembered for was written after he left it.

Theophylact was consecrated bishop and sent to Ochrid, seat of the archbishopric governing the Bulgarian church, late in the eleventh century; the traditional date of ca. 1078 has been revised by modern scholarship, which places the appointment around 1088–1090. He never fully reconciled himself to the move. His surviving letters—more than 130 of them, the richest window we have onto his inner life—are frank about how far the rough Bulgarian frontier felt from the elegance of Constantinople, and they return often to his longing for the capital and its familiar companions. Yet the same letters show a man who did not merely endure his post but actively governed it: he petitioned the imperial government for relief from the tax burdens crushing the Bulgarian poor, defended his flock against the Bogomil and Paulician heresies then troubling the region, and attended to the ecclesiastical affairs of a vast and unfamiliar diocese. He is commemorated in the Church as Saint Theophylact of Ohrid, with his feast kept on the thirty-first of December.

The date and place of his death are not perfectly settled. The latest event that can be dated from his own correspondence falls around 1107–1108, and on this basis he is often said to have died shortly after; other threads in the letters, and the tradition that he withdrew toward Thessalonica in his final years, suggest to some modern scholars a longer episcopate. What is certain is only that he held the see of Ochrid for something like a quarter of a century, and that the commentaries gathered in this volume are the fruit of those years—the sustained scholarly labor of an exile who channeled into exegesis the learning and energy he could no longer spend on a career in Constantinople.

The archdiocese Theophylact presided over was unlike most Byzantine sees. Ochrid, the ancient seat of the Bulgarian church, administered a vast territory across the Balkan interior whose population was predominantly Slavic-speaking outside the principal towns. Its archbishops—typically, as Theophylact was, Greek appointees sent out from the capital—governed communities whose language, customs, and history were foreign to nearly everything the capital had prepared them for. Theophylact’s letters preserve the texture of the resulting tension: a deeply cultivated Greek scholar administering, for two decades, a church whose people he at first found alien, yet whom he also came to defend, energetically and repeatedly, in their dealings with the imperial government. It was precisely this bifurcated position—an insider to Byzantine power who had become the voice of a peripheral church—that gave the biblical commentaries their occasion. They belong to a man with time, learning, and no other outlet for either.

In scope, Theophylact’s biblical commentaries constitute the most comprehensive New Testament exposition produced by any Byzantine author: all four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the thirteen letters traditionally ascribed to Saint Paul together with Hebrews, and all seven Catholic Epistles—James; First and Second Peter; First, Second, and Third John; and Jude. To this New Testament corpus he added commentaries on five books of the Old Testament Minor Prophets—Hosea, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, and Habakkuk—read in their Septuagint text. Taken together, the commentaries amount to a systematic working-through of nearly the whole biblical canon as the Byzantine church received it.

The commentaries are not uniform in shape, though their underlying method is constant. The four Gospel commentaries open with the fullest apparatus: a short Life of the Evangelist drawn from earlier sources, a list of the Gospel’s chapters or headings, and a prologue addressing why there are four Gospels and what each contributes. The commentaries on Paul’s letters instead open with an “Argument,” a compact preface setting the letter’s occasion—to whom Paul wrote, why, and in what spirit. Beneath these differing thresholds, every commentary proceeds by the same discipline: the lemma. Theophylact quotes the biblical text—a verse, or a small cluster of verses when the sense demands it—in full, and only then expounds it. Every interpretive remark is thus anchored to a specific quoted passage, so that the exposition never floats free of the words that prompted it, and a reader can pause at any single lemma and read Theophylact’s comment on that passage alone.

The relationship to Saint John Chrysostom (ca. 347–407) is foundational throughout. Chrysostom’s vast homiletical expositions of the New Testament had, by Theophylact’s day, stood for the better part of a millennium as the unsurpassed authority in Byzantine biblical interpretation, and Theophylact draws on them extensively, condensing and adapting Chrysostom’s arguments as they move through the same text—most closely of all in the commentary on Luke, which is explicitly a compendium of Chrysostom’s homilies on that Gospel. The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica put the relationship exactly: the commentaries are “founded on those of Chrysostom,” yet earn their place by “appositeness, sobriety, accuracy and judiciousness”—qualities that show themselves wherever Theophylact keeps closer to the text than Chrysostom’s preaching had room to, holding doctrinal controversy in the background and moving steadily from the words of a passage to their claim on the reader.

Theophylact’s place in the history of Christian exegesis is a distinctive one. He wrote at the far end of the great age of Greek patristic commentary, several centuries after the Fathers whose interpretations he had absorbed, but before the later Byzantine catenae—anthologies stringing together excerpts from many authorities around each verse—had come to dominate the field. He belongs to both worlds and to neither. Like the catenists, he understands his task as the faithful transmission of an inheritance rather than the invention of something new; but unlike them, he does not merely quote and juxtapose his sources. He digests them and speaks in one continuous voice, so that the reader hears not a chorus of citations but a single teacher expounding the text from beginning to end—which is a large part of why his commentaries read so smoothly, and why they outlived so many of their competitors.

Doctrinally, the commentaries stand confidently within the faith of the ecumenical councils. Theophylact defends the eternity and full divinity of the Word against Arius, who made the Son a creature, and against Sabellius, who collapsed the three divine Persons into one; he upholds the reality of the incarnation and the two natures of Christ, and he defends the perpetual virginity of the Theotokos. His comment on the opening of John’s Gospel amounts to a small treatise on Trinitarian orthodoxy, patiently worked out against the ancient heresies by name. Because these are doctrines the whole Christian Church confesses in common, his witness on them has been valued well beyond the Christian East.

The Old Testament commentaries show the same method applied to harder material. Approaching the Minor Prophets through the Septuagint, Theophylact is acutely aware that prophetic texts carry a difficulty the Gospels and Epistles do not: the Spirit conveys to each prophet what that prophet is equipped to receive, and the resulting words must then be rendered from Hebrew idiom into the very different resources of Greek. His response is not to accumulate historical background on the Assyrian and Syrian campaigns that lie behind Hosea or Nahum, but to press through the historical surface to the figure beneath it—reading Hosea’s unfaithful wife as Israel’s apostasy and the Church’s calling home, Jonah’s three days in the sea-monster as a type of the Resurrection, and the Minor Prophets as a body as sustained testimony to Christ and the life of the New Covenant.

The Greek text of the commentaries is well preserved and has been continuously accessible since the eighteenth century. The first modern critical edition of Theophylact’s collected works—Greek text with a facing Latin translation and an introductory dissertation—was produced by J. F. B. de Rubeis and published in four folio volumes at Venice between 1754 and 1763; it remained the standard reference for a century and a half. Jacques Paul Migne subsequently incorporated the de Rubeis edition into his Patrologia Graeca, where Theophylact’s works fill volumes 123 through 126—still the most widely available form of the Greek text, since no new critical edition has superseded de Rubeis. Margaret Mullett’s monograph on the letters remains the most thorough English-language scholarly account of the man; Dimitri Obolensky’s portrait in his collected Byzantine studies gives the fullest treatment of the broader career.

Among Orthodox Christians the commentaries have been in continuous use since the eleventh century, translated into Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Romanian, and modern Greek. The judgment most often quoted in English is Bishop Nikolaj Velimirović of Ohrid’s—himself Theophylact’s successor in the same see and himself a Serbian saint—who wrote that the commentaries on the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament “are the finest works of their sort after St. John Chrysostom, and are read to this day with great benefit.”

In the Latin West the reach has been almost as long. Thomas Aquinas commissioned a Latin translation of Theophylact’s Gospel commentaries for his Catena Aurea, and by the scholar Jane Sloan Peters’s count Theophylact is cited 1,017 times across three of its four Gospel volumes—second in frequency among Greek authors only to Chrysostom. In the sixteenth century the Greek text was printed at Rome, and Latin translations followed from scholars on both sides of the Reformation divide; Erasmus made use of the Gospel commentaries in his own work on the New Testament, for a time citing the author under the mistaken name “Vulgarius,” a misreading of the manuscript tradition that took decades to correct. That a Byzantine archbishop should have been read with profit by a medieval Scholastic, a Renaissance humanist, and reformers of opposing camps is itself a measure of the balance his commentaries offer: he remains one of the few interpreters whom Christians of many traditions can still read together without suspicion.

The ongoing vitality of the commentaries in both Orthodox and wider Christian use reflects what they genuinely offer—not merely the record of a Byzantine exegetical tradition, but working tools of biblical interpretation. Theophylact’s preoccupations are not historical curiosities: what Scripture means, how it speaks of Christ, and what it asks of the person who reads it are questions as alive now as they were at the court of Alexios Komnenos.

This composite edition brings together thirty-one of Saint Theophylact’s biblical commentaries—the five Minor Prophet commentaries, the four Gospels, Acts, the thirteen Pauline letters together with Hebrews, and the seven Catholic Epistles—arranged in canonical order and presented as consecutive sections of a single work. Each commentary carries its own introduction, oriented to that book in particular, so that a reader may take up any single commentary and find it whole, or follow the whole edition from the Old Testament Minor Prophets through to the Catholic Epistles as one continuous exposition of Theophylact’s biblical theology.

The English throughout is a fresh translation made directly from the Greek—chiefly the text preserved in the Migne Patrologia Graeca. Within each commentary, the biblical passage under discussion appears at the head of its section in quotation marks, set off from Theophylact’s own prose; this is the lemma, and the reader can always tell at a glance which words are Scripture and which are the commentator’s. Scriptural lemmata follow Theophylact’s own quoted wording rather than being conformed to any familiar modern version. The original Greek, a Russian translation, and a Latin facing-column edition are available as parallel views alongside the English for readers who wish to trace the commentary through the languages in which it has chiefly been read.