Latin Christianity in the Danubian Provinces

Poetovio sat on the Drava in Pannonia Superior, a road town on the frontier, and around the year 300 its bishop was writing commentaries on scripture in Latin - the first anyone is known to have written. Jerome, who came from the same corner of the world and read him carefully, said Victorinus knew Greek better than Latin, so that his works were excellent in sense and inferior in style; what Jerome did not say, and did, was that he found the theology objectionable too. Victorinus expected a literal thousand-year reign of the saints on earth, which was ordinary enough in his own generation and had become an embarrassment by Jerome's, so when Jerome reissued the Commentary on the Apocalypse he rewrote the ending. He also kept the thing that mattered most in it. Victorinus had seen that the seals, the trumpets and the bowls are not a sequence of events but the same events told three times over, and that reading - recapitulation - is the one the Latin West went on using. He died in the persecution around 304. Within fifty years the same provinces were the base of the bishops who ran the Homoian church of the West: Valens of Mursa and Ursacius of Singidunum, the Sirmium creeds of the 350s, and finally Palladius of Ratiaria, deposed at Aquileia in 381 by a council that came up from Italy to do it.