27 - Apollinarius of Laodicea, Fragments of Other Writings

Summary

The ecclesiastical condemnation of Apollinarius of Laodicea (ca. 315–392) resulted in few of his writings surviving intact, unless they had been transmitted under the names of church fathers of unimpeachable orthodoxy such as Gregory Thaumaturgus, Julius of Rome, and Athanasius of Alexandria.¹ However, fifth- and sixth-century writers such as Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Leontius of Byzantium, Emperor Justinian, and others still had access to more texts than we do today, and in works of Christological polemics they excerpted passages from the writings of Apollinarius to demonstrate his problematic views. Thus more than 150 fragments of Apollinarius are extant, preserved mainly in these polemical tracts. A selection of these fragments is translated here. Though they derive from various writings of Apollinarius about which little or nothing is known, these fragments have been selected because they bring out the most distinctive features of his Christology.² And yet, since these fragments were quoted by those who preserved them precisely because they were deemed to reveal the most controversial aspects of Apollinarius’s Christology, they must be interpreted with care and caution (particularly 111 and 113).