John II of Jerusalem

Saint John II of Jerusalem was bishop of Jerusalem from 387 to 417, successor of Saint Cyril. In the view of a growing number of modern scholars, he is the author of the five Mystagogical Catecheses traditionally ascribed to Cyril. The Orthodox Church remembers him on 30 March, the Catholic Church on 10 January; the Coptic Church remembers him on 13 Paoni.

He was born about the year 356 and was at first a monk. He succeeded to the see of Jerusalem at Cyril's death, in 386 or 387. He was a contemporary of Rufinus of Aquileia and of Jerome, with whom he had disagreements. By his order the building of the church of Holy Zion was begun.

His authority was harshly questioned twice by Jerome, then abbot in Bethlehem. The first time was in the first dispute with the followers of Origen: Jerome accused John of supporting Origenist ideas, among them that the Son does not see the Father, that souls are confined in bodies as in a prison, that the devil may be saved, that the skins with which God clothed Adam and Eve were human bodies, that the body at the resurrection will be without sex, that the descriptions of Paradise are allegorical and that the image of God was altogether lost at the Fall. John ignored the accusations and gave assurances about his faith in the Trinity; it is probable, however, that he had some Origenist leanings. The occasion of the crisis was the visit of Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis in Cyprus, to Jerusalem, in 394, who preached in the Church of the Resurrection a sharp sermon against Origenism, thought to be aimed at John himself. After many unseemly scenes, Epiphanius advised Jerome and his friends to separate from their bishop, John, and, to make them fully independent, ordained Paulinian, Jerome's brother, to the priesthood, against his will, before the age of thirty and in breach of the bishop's rights. John appealed to Alexandria against Jerome and his supporters as schismatics, and Bishop Theophilus at once took John's side. The dispute lasted nearly four years and, after some attempts at reconciliation, with much bitterness, amounting to the practical excommunication of Jerome and his friends, it was stopped, perhaps by Theophilus. It flared up again when Jerome sharply criticized John's reception of some of the four hundred Origenist monks of Nitria, driven from the Egyptian deserts by Theophilus.

The second harsh attack on John, in 414, also came from Jerome and concerned Pelagius: Jerome, supported by a Latin disciple of Augustine, Paulus Orosius, took a stand against the deacon Pelagius, who was received in Jerusalem and not explicitly condemned by the synod of Diospolis (415). A letter of Pope Innocent I survives which censures John for letting the Pelagians cause disturbance at Bethlehem and urges him to be more watchful over his diocese; it is dated 417, the year of the death of both John and Innocent, and John probably never received it. The accusation of Arianism seems simplistic, and we probably do not have all the information. In 415, two years before his death, he was probably directly involved in the discovery of the relics of Saint Stephen. Because of the condemnation of his memory, his writings were not generally kept under his name, but besides the Mystagogical Catecheses it is very probable that some homilies, in Greek, Georgian or Armenian, should be restored to him, as happened in the second half of the twentieth century with his homilies on the Feast of the Angels and on the Dedication of the Church of Holy Zion. A liturgical lectionary of Jerusalem, preserved in an old Armenian version, is also attributed to him. Gennadius of Massilia says that he wrote a book against those who disparaged his studies, in which he shows that he follows the genius of Origen, not his creed.