Pope Saint Zephyrinus: The Fifteenth Pope, His Brilliant Enemy, and the Trinity Before the Councils

The fifteenth in a series on the popes.

Every pope so far in this series has been seen, when we can see him at all, through friendly eyes—a succession list compiled to defend his office, a thank-you letter, a chronicle written by his church’s own clerks. With Zephyrinus the camera changes hands. Nearly everything vivid we know about the fifteenth pope comes from a man who despised him: Hippolytus, the most learned theologian Rome had yet produced, a future saint of the Catholic Church—and the future rival, perhaps the first antipope, against Zephyrinus’s successor. Hippolytus thought Zephyrinus stupid, venal, and doctrinally asleep at the tiller, and said so in writing that survives. The historian’s task is to read a reign through that hostility without adopting it, and the effort turns out to be worth the trouble. For the crisis Zephyrinus allegedly fumbled was nothing less than the first sustained Christian struggle over how God can be one and Jesus Christ can be Lord—the Trinitarian question, a full century before Nicaea gave the Church words for it. And the two sentences this “ignorant” pope contributed to that struggle ended up, of all places, in Denzinger—the standard collection of the Church’s dogmatic declarations. The fool of Hippolytus’s polemic is, in the Church’s book, the first pope on record teaching the faith against two opposite errors at once. Both portraits cannot be the whole truth. Holding them together is what this entry is for.

This is the fifteenth entry in my series on the popes, following Peter, Linus, Anacletus, Clement, Evaristus, Alexander I, Sixtus I, Telesphorus, Hyginus, Pius I, Anicetus, Soter, Eleutherius, and Victor I.

The Longest Reign Yet

The frame of the pontificate is quickly told. Eusebius records that after Victor’s ten years, “Zephyrinus was appointed his successor about the ninth year of the reign of Severus”—a synchronism (201/2) that sits a year or two loose against the arithmetic of Victor’s reign, in the usual manner of these notices—and that he died during the first year of the emperor Elagabalus, “having held his office for eighteen years.”⁠¹ The conventional dates, built from the chronicle tradition’s consular anchors, are 198/9 to 217. Eighteen years and change made his the longest Roman pontificate yet of Peter’s successors—longer than anything the second century had seen, and not matched again for nearly a century. The Liber Pontificalis makes him a Roman, son of Habundius, and appends two decrees—that ordinations be performed “in the presence of all the clergy and the faithful laity,” and an obscure regulation about “vessels of glass” carried before the priests at mass—which its own translator finds textually “corrupt and obscure”; the old Catholic Encyclopedia dismisses both as ascribed “arbitrarily and without historical basis.”⁠²

The reign opened under pressure. In the early years of the third century the emperor Septimius Severus moved against conversion to Christianity—the persecution that made martyrs of Perpetua and Felicity at Carthage in 203 and struck the catechetical school at Alexandria, driving the young Origen’s father to a martyr’s death. How hard the pressure fell on the church of Rome itself the sources do not say; the old Catholic Encyclopedia notes candidly that “nothing is known as to the execution of the edict in Rome itself nor of the martyrs of the Roman Church in this era.”⁠³ What can be said is that Zephyrinus governed through it—eighteen years spanning the worst imperial hostility since Marcus Aurelius, with no recorded loss of nerve and, it must be added, no recorded anything else from the persecution years. The silence cuts both ways, and honesty keeps it silent.

The Hostile Witness

Then there is the voice that is anything but silent. Hippolytus of Rome is one of the extraordinary figures of early Christianity: a presbyter (and eventually, by the traditional account, a rival bishop) of prodigious learning—exegete, chronographer, heresiologist—whom Origen himself, visiting Rome, reportedly went to hear preach. Eusebius, cataloguing the era’s writers, says simply that “Hippolytus, who presided over another church, has left writings”—a phrase whose studied vagueness has launched a hundred monographs.⁠⁴ His great heresy-catalogue, the Refutation of All Heresies, was lost for centuries; its rediscovery in a Greek monastery manuscript, published in 1851, handed historians something they possess for no earlier pontificate: a detailed, contemporary, insider’s account of two popes—written by their enemy.⁠⁵

The portrait of Zephyrinus is savage. He was, Hippolytus writes, “an uninformed and shamefully corrupt man,” who “being persuaded by proffered gain, was accustomed to connive” at the presence of heretical teachers; he was “an ignorant and illiterate individual, and one unskilled in ecclesiastical definitions,” whom his deacon Callixtus, “accessible to bribes, and covetous” as the pope was, could “seduce… into whatever course of action he pleased.”⁠⁶ Nearly every modern account of Zephyrinus quotes some of this, and nearly every careful one then adds the necessary discount. Hippolytus was not a neutral observer but a defeated party in a Roman power struggle, writing after Callixtus—the deacon he loathed—had been elected to the chair Hippolytus’s own learning, in his evident estimation, better deserved. The old Catholic Encyclopedia’s gloss is charitable but not absurd: the polemic is “evidently to be understood as meaning that Zephyrinus had not taken the higher studies and had devoted himself to the practical administration of the Church and not to theological learning.”⁠⁷ A church facing persecution without and schism within might reasonably prefer an administrator to a professor. But the discount runs the other way too: polemic exaggerates; it rarely invents from nothing. A pope renowned for theological penetration would not have been vulnerable to this particular caricature. The likeliest Zephyrinus is the one both readings share—a practical man, out of his depth in the subtlest doctrinal dispute Christianity had yet generated, leaning heavily on a formidably capable deacon. Where Hippolytus sees corruption, the evidence compels only limitation.

The Trinity Before the Councils

What was the dispute? It deserves careful statement, because it is the direct ancestor of the Nicene faith the Church confesses to this day. By Zephyrinus’s day the Church confronted two opposite instincts about God, each protecting something essential, each ruinous if followed alone.

One instinct guarded the divine unity. Christianity had inherited Israel’s monotheism; there is one God, and no second. Pressed hard, this instinct produced the teaching the ancients called monarchianism in its modalist form—associated with Noetus of Smyrna, taught at Rome by Cleomenes and then by Sabellius, and remembered by the name patripassianism, “Father-suffering.” If God is strictly one, and Christ is God, then the Father and the Son are one and the same, wearing different masks—modes—and it was the Father who was born of Mary and the Father who hung on the Cross. The formula was simple, pious-sounding, and fatal to the entire grammar of the Gospel, in which the Son prays to the Father, is sent by the Father, and returns to him.

The opposite instinct guarded the distinction. The Logos theologians—Hippolytus foremost among them at Rome—insisted that the Word who became flesh is really distinct from the Father who sent him. Pressed hard this instinct courted the opposite disaster: making the Son a second God beside the first, or a lesser divinity below him. Hippolytus’s own theology spoke of the Logos in ways that struck plainer believers as exactly that—and the modalists made the accusation freely. “Ditheist” was the charge Callixtus would later fling at Hippolytus, and it stung because, to an untrained ear, the Logos doctrine sounded like two Gods.⁠⁸ Meanwhile a third party, the Theodotians whom Victor had excommunicated, solved the problem by subtraction: Christ was a “mere man,” and the question of how God could be both one and two did not arise.

Every side, note well, could claim it was defending the faith. That is what made the moment dangerous, and it is the essential context for judging the pope who presided over it. The Church possessed no agreed technical vocabulary—no ousia and hypostasis, no “person” and “nature,” no conciliar definitions. Those tools were forged in precisely this fight and its successors, over the following two centuries. Zephyrinus stood at the moment when the questions had arrived and the answers had not.

Two Sentences

Hippolytus reports—with contempt—what Zephyrinus actually said. Callixtus, he claims, managed the pope, “and induced him publicly to avow the following sentiments”:

I know that there is one God, Jesus Christ; nor except Him do I know any other that is begotten and amenable to suffering.

And on another occasion:

The Father did not die, but the Son.⁠⁹

Hippolytus quotes these two sentences as proof that Zephyrinus was a confused man being played by both sides—and, read as systematic theology, they are indeed unsystematic. But read them as what they are—a working bishop’s public rulings in a shouting doctrinal crisis—and something else appears. The first sentence confesses the full divinity of Christ against the Theodotians (“one God, Jesus Christ”) and refuses any second, separable deity of the kind the Logos speculation was suspected of implying (“nor except Him do I know any other”). The second sentence turns and cuts the other way, refusing the modalist conclusion outright: whatever the unity of Father and Son, it was not the Father who died on the Cross. One God; Christ truly God; the Father not crucified. Each error on offer is refused in its trademark claim, and nothing heretical is affirmed. What is missing is what would not exist for another century: a positive account of how the Father and the Son are distinct—and that gap is the opening Hippolytus drove through.

This is not a private reading. The standard collection of the Church’s dogmatic patrimony—the Denzinger Enchiridion, where the definitions of Nicaea and Chalcedon and Trent are catalogued—prints precisely these sentences from Hippolytus’s hostile report as the doctrinal declarations of the Roman church of this era, under the heading of Zephyrinus and Callixtus.⁠¹⁰ There is a fine irony in the mechanics of it: the quotations survive only because Hippolytus preserved them to mock them, and the Church receives as an early witness of its faith the very sentences its most learned contemporary offered as evidence of incompetence. (There is a wrinkle of attribution, too. In Hippolytus’s Greek both statements are Zephyrinus’s public avowals, made—he sneers—at Callixtus’s prompting; Denzinger’s editors assign the second sentence to Callixtus himself. The difference matters little doctrinally, since Hippolytus presents the two men as speaking with one voice, but it is worth noting which source says what.)⁠¹¹

The sober assessment, then, runs something like this. Zephyrinus defined nothing, refuted no one, and coined no vocabulary; the intellectual work of the crisis was done by others, much of it by his enemy. What he did was refuse both exits. Under pressure from a heresy of unity and a suspicion of plurality, the Roman church under Zephyrinus declined to ratify either—kept confessing, in whatever clumsy words came to hand, that God is one, that Jesus Christ is that one God begotten and suffering, and that the Father did not die. A century later, with the vocabulary finally forged, the Church would say it better. It would not say anything different. If theology is a science, Zephyrinus contributed nothing to it; if it is also, at moments of crisis, the art of not saying the wrong thing while the right words do not yet exist, the fifteenth pope practiced it—however inelegantly—at the moment it mattered most.

Hippolytus, it should in fairness be added, judged the performance differently: in his telling Zephyrinus was “enticed away” into the modalists’ own opinions and would “continue to keep up ceaseless disturbance among the people” by his inconsistency, and the firm line came only from Hippolytus’s own camp.⁠¹² Perhaps so. A pope temporizing between factions and a pope refusing two errors can look identical from inside the fight; which he was depends on a judgment of motive the evidence cannot settle. What the evidence does preserve is what he said—and what he said, the Church still owns.

Natalius, the Salaried Bishop, and the Angels

The most extraordinary episode of the reign concerns the other heresy—the Theodotian “mere man” party—and it is told by the anonymous Roman writer of the “Little Labyrinth,” quoted by Eusebius. After Victor excommunicated their founder, the Theodotians organized as a rival communion, and they wanted a bishop of standing. They found one: Natalius, a confessor—a man who had suffered for the faith in persecution—whom they persuaded, the writer says, “to allow himself to be chosen bishop of this heresy with a salary, to be paid by them, of one hundred and fifty denarii a month.”⁠¹³

A rival bishop in Rome, on retainer. The arrangement did not last, and the account of its ending is one of the strangest and most human passages in early Christian literature. Natalius, the writer reports, began to receive warning visions, which he disregarded—“ensnared by the first position among them and by that shameful covetousness which destroys a great many”—until one night “he was scourged by holy angels, and punished severely through the entire night. Thereupon having risen in the morning, he put on sackcloth and covered himself with ashes, and with great haste and tears he fell down before Zephyrinus, the bishop, rolling at the feet not only of the clergy, but also of the laity; and he moved with his tears the compassionate Church of the merciful Christ.” Even so, the writer adds—in a clause that speaks volumes about the era’s penitential discipline—“though he used much supplication, and showed the welts of the stripes which he had received, yet scarcely was he taken back into communion.”⁠¹⁴

One may make of the angels what one will; the writer plainly believed it, and Natalius’s welts were exhibited in public. For the history of the papacy the scene’s value lies elsewhere. Here is the schismatic bishop of a rival Roman communion, prostrate in sackcloth before Zephyrinus, begging readmission at the feet of clergy and laity together—and receiving it, “scarcely,” after long supplication. Communion with the bishop of Rome was, in the Rome of the early third century, a thing a man would crawl for. The scene also quietly corroborates the fractionated-church picture this series has traced since Pius: the Theodotians’ wealth could fund a parallel hierarchy, and the boundary between the Church and its rivals ran through neighborhoods, not across an empire. And it shows the penitential rigor of the age—readmission after apostasy of this kind was hard, slow, and public—which is the essential backdrop for the storm over mercy that will break under Callixtus in the next entry.

Voices of the Reign: Gaius, Origen, and the Trophies of the Apostles

Three vignettes, each preserved by Eusebius, fill out the pontificate’s Roman landscape—and the first is among the most quoted sentences in all early Christian literature. A learned Roman churchman named Gaius, “a member of the Church, who arose under Zephyrinus,” published a dialogue against the Montanist leader Proclus—the same New Prophecy this series traced under Eleutherius, still contending for recognition a generation later. (If Tertullian’s unnamed bishop of Rome—the one who first issued and then revoked letters of peace to the movement—was not Eleutherius or Victor, he was Zephyrinus; the candidates, as the previous entries noted, cannot be separated.) Defending Rome’s apostolic pedigree against Proclus’s appeal to the tombs of Philip and his prophesying daughters in Asia, Gaius pointed out the window:

But I can show the trophies of the apostles. For if you will go to the Vatican or to the Ostian way, you will find the trophies of those who laid the foundations of this church.⁠¹⁵

The “trophies” (tropaia) are the monuments of Peter and Paul—Peter’s on the Vatican hill, Paul’s on the road to Ostia—and Gaius’s boast, written under Zephyrinus, is the earliest literary witness to the veneration of those two graves on the two sites where the basilicas of St. Peter and St. Paul Outside the Walls stand today. Twentieth-century excavation under St. Peter’s found, beneath the high altar, a second-century funerary monument that most scholars identify as the very “trophy” Gaius meant.⁠¹⁶ In Zephyrinus’s Rome, a churchman answering a doctrinal challenge could appeal to something anyone could walk to: the apostles were there, and everyone knew where.

The second vignette: sometime in this reign, a young Alexandrian scholar made a pilgrimage. Eusebius records that Origen—already famous, not yet thirty—“visited Rome” when “Zephyrinus was bishop,” “desiring,” as Origen himself put it, “to see the most ancient church of Rome.”⁠¹⁷ The greatest Christian mind of the third century thought the church of Zephyrinus worth the voyage—“most ancient,” a church one went to see. He stayed briefly and went home to Alexandria; tradition, via Jerome, has him hearing Hippolytus preach while there. The visit decided nothing and symbolizes much: whatever Hippolytus thought of its bishop, the Rome of Zephyrinus was already a destination.

And the third: it was under Zephyrinus, by the reckoning of Eusebius’s sources, that the church of Rome took corporate charge of a burial ground—the underground cemetery on the Appian Way that would bear, forever after, not Zephyrinus’s name but his deacon’s. Hippolytus reports the appointment in a single loaded clause: Zephyrinus, he says, brought Callixtus back from Antium and “appointed him over the cemetery.”⁠¹⁸ The cemetery, with the definite article—the church’s own, the first of which that can be said. The administration of that cemetery, and the whole extraordinary career of the man appointed to it, belong to the next entry; here it is enough to mark what the appointment means for Zephyrinus’s reign. Under the pope his enemy called an incompetent, the Roman church organized its charity toward the dead as it had long organized its charity toward the living—acquired, staffed, and administered the first common burial ground of the Roman Christians, the nucleus of the catacomb where a generation of his successors would lie.

The Martyrdom That Isn’t There

Zephyrinus died in 217, and the Liber Pontificalis records his burial “in his own cemetery near the cemetery of Calistus on the Via Appia”—above ground, that is, at the complex his deacon administered; later tradition placed his tomb in a small surface basilica there, and the Salesian custodians of the site today point, with an honest “perhaps,” to the eastern of the two small funerary basilicas in the field above the catacomb.⁠¹⁹ He was the first pope buried at the complex that would receive so many of his successors—though above it, not in it.

The martyr title came later, and it has nothing behind it. No early source records a violent death; his reign ended under Caracalla’s successor in a lull of the persecutions; and the fourth-century Roman lists know nothing of a martyred Zephyrinus. The medieval books nonetheless styled him “pope and martyr,” with a feast on August 26—a date that appears to derive from nothing sturdier than a late misreading, since the Liber Pontificalis itself buries him in late August by one recension’s date while the older tradition of his death points to December. The 1969 reform of the calendar removed the feast, stating plainly that he was not a martyr and that August 26 was not the anniversary of his death; the current Martyrologium Romanum commemorates him on December 20—his dies natalis—as the pope who “governed the Church of Rome for eighteen years and gave his deacon Saint Callixtus the charge of building the cemetery of the Church of Rome on the Via Appia.”⁠²⁰ The official memory of Zephyrinus, in other words, is precisely the two facts this entry has argued are load-bearing: the long reign, and the cemetery.

Judging Zephyrinus

How should the fifteenth pope be ranked? The temptation is to accept Hippolytus’s verdict at a discount—concede the mediocrity, subtract the malice—and file Zephyrinus among the forgettable. The reader has perhaps noticed that this entry declines the filing. Three considerations, none sentimental, argue for a higher estimate.

First, the man kept the Church together for eighteen years through a persecution and a doctrinal civil war, and it did not break. The parties that broke away—Theodotian and, arguably, Hippolytan—broke against him and his successor, not through them; the rival bishop on the Theodotian payroll ended face-down in sackcloth at Zephyrinus’s feet. Second, what he actually said, as opposed to what was said about him, has worn astonishingly well: two off-the-cuff rulings, preserved by an enemy as evidence of confusion, that the standard registry of the Church’s doctrine now prints among the earliest Roman declarations of Trinitarian faith. Any pope might envy that ratio of words uttered to words canonized. Third, his one undisputed administrative act—setting Callixtus over the cemetery—proved to be one of the more consequential appointments of the early papacy: it created the institution of the Roman church’s common burial grounds, and it trained, tested, and positioned the successor whose pontificate would force the Church’s first great reckoning over the forgiveness of sins.

None of this makes Zephyrinus great. It makes him something history should respect more than it does: the ordinary man at the extraordinary juncture, who did not have the answers, knew the wrong ones when he heard them, and handed the Church on intact—larger, better organized, and doctrinally uncommitted to any of the errors on offer—to the most improbable successor in its history. To that successor, and to the enemy who documented them both, this series turns next.

Next in the series: Pope Saint Callixtus I, the slave who wore the keys—and the edict of mercy that made his enemies call him the destroyer of discipline.

Further Reading

For the early papacy generally: J. N. D. Kelly and Michael J. Walsh, The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2010), and Eamon Duffy, Saints and Sinners: A History of the Popes, 4th ed. (Yale University Press, 2014). On Hippolytus, the Roman schism, and the era’s church order, Allen Brent, Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 31 (Brill, 1995), is the fundamental modern study; Peter Lampe, From Paul to Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries, trans. Michael Steinhauser (Fortress Press, 2003), remains the standard account of the Roman community’s structure. The hostile primary source is Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, Book IX, trans. J. H. MacMahon, in Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5 (1886); the Natalius and Gaius material is in Eusebius, The History of the Church, trans. A. C. McGiffert, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1 (1890), Books II, V, and VI.

This post is part of an ongoing series on the popes. You can read about Saint Peter, the first pope, Saint Linus, the second pope, Saint Anacletus, the third pope, Saint Clement, the fourth pope, Saint Evaristus, the fifth pope, Saint Alexander I, the sixth pope, Saint Sixtus I, the seventh pope, Saint Telesphorus, the eighth pope, Saint Hyginus, the ninth pope, Saint Pius I, the tenth pope, Saint Anicetus, the eleventh pope, Saint Soter, the twelfth pope, Saint Eleutherius, the thirteenth pope, and Saint Victor I, the fourteenth pope.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Pope Saint Zephyrinus?

Zephyrinus was the fifteenth Bishop of Rome counting Peter as first, reigning c. 199–217—at eighteen years, the longest pontificate of any successor of Peter the Roman church had yet seen. A Roman by birth according to the Liber Pontificalis, he governed through the persecution of Septimius Severus and the first great Trinitarian controversy, relying heavily on his deacon (and eventual successor) Callixtus, whom he set over the Roman church’s first corporately administered cemetery on the Appian Way. Most of what we know of him personally comes from the hostile account of Hippolytus, who called him ignorant and venal—a portrait historians discount as the polemic of a defeated rival, without entirely dismissing its picture of a practical administrator rather than a theologian.

When did Zephyrinus reign as pope?

From about 198/9 to 217. Eusebius places his accession “about the ninth year of the reign of Severus” and his death in the first year of Elagabalus’s reign, “having held his office for eighteen years”; the conventional dates rest on the chronicle tradition’s consular anchors. His eighteen-year reign spanned the Severan persecution and ended in the political chaos following Caracalla’s assassination.

What did Pope Zephyrinus teach about the Trinity?

Two public statements survive, both preserved—mockingly—by Hippolytus: “I know that there is one God, Jesus Christ; nor except Him do I know any other that is begotten and amenable to suffering,” and “The Father did not die, but the Son.” Read together, they confess the full divinity of Christ against the Theodotians, refuse a second separable deity against the suspicions raised by Logos speculation, and reject the modalist claim that the Father suffered on the Cross. Denzinger’s collection of the Church’s dogmatic declarations prints these sentences as the Roman teaching of the era—clumsy in expression, orthodox in boundary—though Hippolytus, who preserved them, read the same sentences as vacillation—a century before Nicaea supplied the vocabulary.

Who was Hippolytus, and why did he attack Zephyrinus?

Hippolytus was the most learned Roman churchman of his generation—exegete, chronicler, and author of the Refutation of All Heresies, rediscovered in the nineteenth century and published in 1851. A champion of Logos theology, he regarded Zephyrinus as an ignorant administrator manipulated by the deacon Callixtus, and accused both of tolerating (and finally embracing) modalist error. After Callixtus’s election in 217 he broke communion and, by the traditional account, was set up as a rival bishop—the first antipope—though some modern scholars read the split as a rivalry between Roman house-church communities rather than a formal schism. By the same tradition he died reconciled to the Church, exiled to Sardinia with Pope Pontian in 235, and he is venerated as a saint.

What happened with Natalius, the “salaried bishop”?

After Victor excommunicated Theodotus the cobbler, the Theodotian party hired a confessor named Natalius as bishop of their rival Roman communion at a salary of 150 denarii a month. According to the contemporary account Eusebius preserves, Natalius was warned in visions, then “scourged by holy angels” through a night, and appeared at dawn in sackcloth and ashes, throwing himself at the feet of Zephyrinus, the clergy, and the laity; after long supplication, and showing the welts, he was “scarcely” readmitted to communion. The episode illustrates both the wealth of the era’s schismatic parties and the severe penitential discipline of the early third-century Roman church.

Was Zephyrinus a martyr, and when is his feast day?

He was not a martyr on any early evidence, and the Church no longer styles him one. The medieval calendar kept “St. Zephyrinus, Pope and Martyr” on August 26; the 1969 reform removed the feast, noting that he was not a martyr and that the date was not the anniversary of his death. The current Martyrologium Romanum commemorates him on December 20—the traditional day of his death in 217—as the pope who governed Rome for eighteen years and entrusted the church’s cemetery on the Appian Way to his deacon Callixtus. He was buried above that cemetery, in a surface tomb; tradition has his relics later translated to San Silvestro in Capite.

Footnotes

1. 1. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica V.28.7 and VI.21.1, trans. A. C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1890). Available at NewAdvent.org and NewAdvent.org. VI.21.1: "During his first year the Roman bishop, Zephyrinus, having held his office for eighteen years, died, and Callistus received the episcopate." The "first year" is that of Elagabalus ("another Antoninus"), 218 by Eusebius's count—one year off the conventional 217, in the usual manner.

2. 2. Liber Pontificalis, "Zephyrinus," in Louise Ropes Loomis, The Book of the Popes (Liber Pontificalis) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1916), 19–20, with Loomis's notes: on the ordination decree, "So far as we have record, the ordination ceremonies of the clergy have always been public"; on the glass-vessels passage, "The following passage is corrupt and obscure. It must be read freely in order to get any meaning from it." Johann Peter Kirsch, "Pope St. Zephyrinus," in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 15 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1912), NewAdvent.org, judges the two ordinances ascribed "arbitrarily and without historical basis."

3. 3. Kirsch, "Pope St. Zephyrinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 15 (1912). On the Severan persecution generally—the martyrdoms at Carthage (Perpetua and Felicity, 203) and the blow to the Alexandrian school (Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VI.1–2)—see the standard histories.

4. 4. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VI.20.2, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 1; NewAdvent.org. On the traditions of Origen hearing Hippolytus preach, see Jerome, De viris illustribus 61.

5. 5. The Refutation's Books IV–X were recovered in a fourteenth-century manuscript from Mount Athos and published in 1851 (initially under Origen's name); the attribution to Hippolytus became standard in the following decades, with J. J. I. von Döllinger's Hippolytus und Kallistus (1853) the foundational study. On the modern debate over the corpus—including the thesis that "Hippolytus" covers more than one author and that the famous statue-catalogue belongs to a school rather than an individual—see Allen Brent, Hippolytus and the Roman Church in the Third Century, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 31 (Leiden: Brill, 1995).

6. 6. Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies IX.7 and IX.11 (ANF chs. 2 and 6), trans. J. H. MacMahon, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5 (Buffalo: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1886). Available at NewAdvent.org. The chapter numbers of the ANF translation differ from the critical editions' book-section numbering (Wendland/Marcovich); both are given here on first citation.

7. 7. Kirsch, "Pope St. Zephyrinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 15 (1912): "The pope is described by Hippolytus in the 'Philosophumena' (IX, xi) as a simple man without education. This is evidently to be understood as meaning that Zephyrinus had not taken the higher studies…"

8. 8. Hippolytus, Refutation IX.11–12 (ANF chs. 6–7), where Callixtus's "Ye are Ditheists" retort is reported; trans. MacMahon, ANF vol. 5. On the theological positions—Noetus, Cleomenes, Sabellius on the modalist side; the Logos theology of Hippolytus on the other—see the surveys in Brent, Hippolytus and the Roman Church, and J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 5th ed. (London: A&C Black, 1977), ch. 5.

9. 9. Hippolytus, Refutation IX.11 (ANF ch. 6), trans. MacMahon, ANF vol. 5; NewAdvent.org: "Now Callistus brought forward Zephyrinus himself, and induced him publicly to avow the following sentiments: 'I know that there is one God, Jesus Christ; nor except Him do I know any other that is begotten and amenable to suffering.' And on another occasion, when he would make the following statement: 'The Father did not die, but the Son.'"

10. 10. H. Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum: in the older numbering, §42a, under the joint heading of Zephyrinus and Callistus I (217–222), "The Incarnate Word," sourced "[From St. Hippolytus's Philosophy IX 11, about the year 230]"; in the current Denzinger-Hünermann numbering the material stands at DH 105 under the declarations of Zephyrinus and Callixtus. English text of the older numbering at Patristica.net.

11. 11. In MacMahon's ANF rendering of Refutation IX.11, both statements are avowals of Zephyrinus made at Callixtus's prompting; the English Denzinger (§42a) brackets the second—"then indeed [Callistus] said: The Father did not die, but the Son"—assigning it to Callixtus. The underlying Greek participles admit either construal; the two men are, in Hippolytus's presentation, a single doctrinal party.

12. 12. Hippolytus, Refutation IX.11 (ANF ch. 6), trans. MacMahon: "Zephyrinus would in this way continue to keep up ceaseless disturbance among the people." Kirsch's reading—"Zephyrinus said simply that he acknowledged only one God, and this was the Lord Jesus Christ, but it was the Son, not the Father, Who had died. This was the doctrine of the tradition of the Church"—represents the charitable assessment this entry follows: "Pope St. Zephyrinus," Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 15 (1912).

13. 13. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica V.28.8–10, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 1; NewAdvent.org. The figure is one hundred and fifty denarii; the old Catholic Encyclopedia's Zephyrinus article misprints it as 170. On the "Little Labyrinth" and its authorship, see McGiffert's introductory note to the chapter.

14. 14. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica V.28.11–12, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 1.

15. 15. Gaius, Dialogue with Proclus, quoted in Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica II.25.6–7, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 1; NewAdvent.org: "It is confirmed likewise by Caius, a member of the Church, who arose under Zephyrinus, bishop of Rome." The dialogue itself is noticed at Historia Ecclesiastica VI.20.3, "held at Rome under Zephyrinus, with Proclus, who contended for the Phrygian heresy."

16. 16. On the excavations beneath St. Peter's (1940–1949) and the identification of the second-century aedicula—the "Trophy of Gaius"—beneath the high altar, see the standard accounts, e.g., John Evangelist Walsh, The Bones of St. Peter (New York: Doubleday, 1982), and the discussion in the Peter entry of this series.

17. 17. Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica VI.14.10, trans. McGiffert, NPNF 2nd series, vol. 1; NewAdvent.org: "But Adamantius—for this also was a name of Origen—when Zephyrinus was bishop of Rome, visited Rome, 'desiring,' as he himself somewhere says, 'to see the most ancient church of Rome.'"

18. 18. Hippolytus, Refutation IX.12 (ANF ch. 7), trans. MacMahon, ANF vol. 5: "And after Victor's death, Zephyrinus, having had Callistus as a fellow-worker in the management of his clergy, paid him respect to his own damage; and transferring this person from Antium, appointed him over the cemetery."

19. 19. Liber Pontificalis, "Zephyrinus" (Loomis, The Book of the Popes, 20), with Loomis's note: "Later tradition fixed Zephyrinus' tomb in a small basilica over the catacomb of Callistus. Beginning with him the popes of the third century were buried in the cemeteries about the Via Appia, no longer in the resting place of the apostle Peter, which may have been full." The official guide of the Catacombs of St. Callixtus notes that in the eastern of the two surface "Trichora" basilicas "were perhaps laid to rest pope Zephyrinus and the young martyr of the Eucharist, St. Tarcisius."

20. 20. Calendarium Romanum (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1969), on the removal of the August 26 feast, he not being a martyr and the day not being the anniversary of his death; Martyrologium Romanum, editio typica altera (Vatican City: Typis Vaticanis, 2004), 20 December. The Liber Pontificalis gives the burial date as August 25—the likely root of the medieval August feast. On the later translation of relics ascribed to Sergius II, with San Silvestro in Capite as the traditional destination, see the notices collected in the standard topographies of the Callixtus complex.