Historical Context
Antipater led the church of Bostra during a period of intense doctrinal controversy in the Christian East. He had become metropolitan by 457, succeeding Constantine, and flourished around 460. As metropolitan of the province of Arabia Petraea he ranked among the prominent Greek ecclesiastical leaders of the region.
His close ties to Palestinian monasticism, especially to Euthymius the Great and his circle, situated him within the theological currents that would shape the wider Church's response to Origenism in the generations after him.
Theological Writings
Antipater's most significant work was his Refutation of the Apology for Origen, a response to a text written by Pamphilus of Caesarea around 309. In it he denounced the doctrines of the pre-existence of souls and apocatastasis (universal restoration) with dogmatic precision, and opposed Origen's allegorical interpretations of the creation narrative in Genesis.
His refutation was highly regarded as a masterly composition. By 540 church leaders ordered it to be read in the churches of the East as an antidote to the spread of Origenistic heresies. Cyril of Scythopolis noted that Antipater served as a chief doctrinal authority during the sixth-century Origenist crisis, though only fragments of the work survive in the acts of the Seventh Ecumenical Council.
Antipater also composed a treatise against the Apollinarists, the errors of Apollinarius being among the heresies for which he is particularly esteemed; this work survives only in brief fragments. The Fathers of the Seventh General Council (787) cited him among authoritative ecclesiastical writers.
Marian Homilies
Antipater authored numerous homilies on the Theotokos reflecting the theological conclusions of the Council of Ephesus. His works develop the Eve-Mary parallel and refer to Mary as Theotokos. He elevated Mary's salvific role, employing an early form of a word by which later theologians would describe her as Mediatrix.
His surviving and attributed writings include four homilies On Christ's Nativity (preserved in Armenian translation); two homilies on Saint John the Baptist, the silence of Zechariah, and Mary's greeting; homilies on the Annunciation and the Visitation; two homilies On Epiphany and On the Beginning of the Fast; a Latin homily On the Assumption of Mary; and two complete homilies, On John the Baptist and On the Annunciation, published in the Patrologia Graeca. Scholars question the authenticity of many of the works attributed to him.
Relics & Shrines
An ancient Greek inscription discovered in the nineteenth century appears to commemorate a large church dedicated to Mary in Bostra. Scholars have proposed that Antipater was its founder. The inscription describes Mary as 'much-sung' and as 'the undefiled dispenser of marvellous gifts.'
