Antipater of Bostra

Saint Antipater of Bostra was metropolitan of Bostra, in the Roman province of Arabia, in the fifth century, one of the foremost critics of Origen. He is commemorated on 13 June. Our sources say nothing about a particular canonization and give no year of death.

Life

Little is known about him. He was born early in the fifth century and was metropolitan of Bostra by 457, after Constantine, who had taken part in Ephesus II (449) and Chalcedon (451). In 457 the emperor Leo I asked him by letter about the authority of the decisions of Chalcedon. The following year he was among those who worked for the release from prison of the Saracen king Terebon. He kept ties with Palestinian monasticism, above all through Saint Euthymius the Great and his disciples. His contemporaries, civil and ecclesiastical, held him in high esteem, and the Fathers of the Seventh Ecumenical Council (787) counted him among the authoritative ecclesiastical writers.

Against Origen

His most important work was the "Antirrhesis", in which he sharply refuted the "Apology for Origen" of Pamphilus and Eusebius of Caesarea; from it only a few fragments have reached us, in the acts of the Seventh Council and in quotations from Saint John of Damascus. He denounced with dogmatic precision the doctrines of the pre-⁠existence of souls and apocatastasis, and Origen's allegorical reading of the creation of man in Genesis. The work was regarded as a masterpiece, and as late as 540 it was ordered to be read in the churches of the East as an antidote to the spread of Origenist errors. According to Cyril of Scythopolis, in the Life of Saint Sabbas, he was for a time the chief doctrinal authority cited in the Origenist crisis of the sixth century. He also wrote a treatise against the Apollinarists, known only in short fragments.

Homilies and devotion to the Mother of God

Several homilies are attributed to him, among them two on Saint John the Baptist, on the silence of Zechariah and the greeting of the Mother of God, on the Annunciation and Visitation, two on Epiphany, one on the beginning of the Fast and four on the Nativity of Christ in Armenian translation, as well as a Latin homily on the Dormition; many scholars consider several of them doubtful. Among those held genuine, the parallel of Eve and Mary is well attested, and Mary is called Theotokos. He speaks very highly of the role of the Mother of God in the economy of salvation. In the nineteenth century an ancient Greek inscription was found at Bostra about the building of a large church of the Mother of God; the founder's name, almost lost, was restored as Antipater, which would show a special devotion to Mary.