Saint Antipater of Bostra

Antipater of Bostra (Ancient Greek: Ἀντίπατρος) was a Greek prelate who served as Metropolitan bishop of Bostra in the Roman province of Arabia and was one of the foremost critics of Origen. He lived in the 5th century AD. Little detail is known of Antipater's life. He was born early in the 5th century and was Metropolitan of Bostra by 457, succeeding Constantine who attended the Councils of Ephesus II (449) and Chalcedon (451). Antipater maintained links with Palestinian Monasticism, particularly through Euthymius the Great and his followers. He was a pronounced opponent of Origen, held in high esteem by his contemporaries both civil and ecclesiastical, and was rated among the authoritative ecclesiastical writers by the Fathers of the Seventh General Council (787). There have reached us, in the acts of this council, only a few fragments of his lengthy refutation of the "Apology for Origen" put together (c. 309) by Pamphilus and Eusebius of Caesarea. The work of Antipater was looked on as a masterly composition, and, as late as 540 was ordered to be read in the churches of the East as an antidote to the spread of the Origenistic heresies (Cotelier, Monument. Eccl. Graec., III, 362). He also wrote a treatise against the Apollinarists, known only in brief fragments, and several homilies, two of which have reached us in their entirety. Antipater's date of death is unknown. His memory is kept on 13 June. The most significant contribution Antipater made was his staunch opposition to Origenism. In his Life of Sabbas the Sanctified, Cyril of Scythopolis says that Antipater was for a time the chief doctrinal authority cited in the Origenist crisis of the 6th century. In his Refutation of the Apology for Origen (a text written by Pamphilus of Caesarea), he denounced the doctrines of the pre-existence of souls and apocatastasis with dogmatic precision. Likewise he opposes Origen's allegorical reading of the creation of man in Genesis.