The Church of Antioch in the Third Century

In 268 or thereabouts the bishops of Syria and Asia Minor met at Antioch for the third time in a few years to deal with their own metropolitan. Paul of Samosata was bishop of the greatest city in the Roman East and, on the account of the council that removed him, a salaried official of the Palmyrene administration that then governed it. The charges mix doctrine with deportment: that he had a raised throne built for himself in church, that he stopped the old hymns and had new ones sung to himself, that women in his household gave scandal. The teaching at issue was that Christ was a man in whom the Word had come to dwell rather than the Word made flesh - the reading later called adoptionist. The council could not make the deposition stick, because the civil power was Palmyrene and Paul had its favour; he went only when Aurelian retook the city in 272 and settled the question of who owned the church building by asking which claimant was in communion with the bishops of Italy and Rome, which is the first time a Roman emperor adjudicated a Christian dispute. The letter announcing the deposition was drafted by Malchion, who ran a rhetorical school in the city and had cross-examined Paul in front of shorthand writers. A generation later, in the same city, a presbyter named Lucian worked over the text of the Greek Bible and taught a circle of students - Arius among them - who afterwards used his name as a badge.