Feast Day: March 28 Canonized: Pre-Congregation — venerated from the fifth century; feast in the Greek Menology (March 28) and Roman Martyrology Order / Vocation: Monk; priest; catechist (didascalos) of the Church of Jerusalem Patron of: Biblical scholars · Exegetes · Monks who write · Priests who teach
The Scholar Whose Psalms Were Attributed to Athanasius
For centuries, a celebrated moralistic commentary on the Psalms was attributed to Athanasius of Alexandria — the great defender of Nicaea, the bishop five times exiled, the pillar of orthodox Christology. Modern scholarship has corrected this attribution: the commentary is Hesychius's. The mistake is understandable. The quality of the work was such that medieval readers assumed it had to belong to the most celebrated name they knew.
This is the most precise single fact that captures who Hesychius of Jerusalem was: a scholar of such depth and range that his work was mistaken, for more than a millennium, for the work of someone vastly more famous. He was not less capable than Athanasius. He was simply not as celebrated. The fame went to Alexandria. The learning stayed in Jerusalem.
Monk, Then Priest, Then Teacher
He was born and educated in Jerusalem — the city where the events of the Gospel had occurred, where the Church of the Resurrection stood over the tomb, where the tradition of pilgrimage was as ancient as the faith itself. He became a monk first, in the ascetic tradition that had taken root in Palestine in the previous generation: the men and women who had gone out to the desert of Judea and the hills of Galilee and established the communities of prayer that would shape Eastern monasticism.
From the desert he returned to the city and was ordained a priest. He was given the office of didascalos — catechist, teacher, the official whose role was the theological and scriptural formation of the community and its clergy. The office placed him at the center of the Church's intellectual life in the Holy City, and it was an office he exercised with extraordinary productivity.
The Greek Menology, in its notice for March 28, credits him with a commentary on the entire Scriptures. Modern research — which has been gradually identifying more of his works hidden in manuscript under the names of other authors — is confirming this claim more fully with each generation of scholarship. His Commentary on Leviticus, his Commentary on Job, his interpretation of the Psalms, his fragments on the Prophets and the Gospels, his sermons — together they represent one of the most sustained exercises in biblical exegesis of the patristic era.
He worked within the allegorical method of the Alexandrian tradition: like his predecessor Origen, he held that every sentence of Scripture contains a mystery of dogma, and that the literal meaning is never the deepest meaning. His comment on Isaiah's phrase about the Lord ascending upon a swift cloud and entering Egypt is characteristic: Christ in the arms of the Virgin. The literal cloud becomes the Mother; the entry into Egypt becomes the Incarnation. The whole of the Old Testament is, for Hesychius, a sustained foreshadowing of Christ.
He knew Jerome, who was at Bethlehem working on the Vulgate translation that would become the Church's authoritative biblical text. He knew Cyril of Alexandria, the theologian who drove the condemnation of Nestorianism at the Council of Ephesus in 431. He was present in 428 or 429 when Bishop Juvenal of Jerusalem consecrated the church of Euthymius's monastery — a moment recorded by the monk Cyril of Scythopolis, who noted Hesychius as a learned priest and teacher in the church in Jerusalem, well known to his contemporaries.
His Eucharistic theology was characteristically realistic: Keep yourselves free from sin so that every day you may share in the mystic meal; by doing so our bodies become the body of Christ. His teaching on the Virgin Mary was the earliest liturgical address on her known to survive: he praised her eternal virginity and perfect purity in terms that the tradition of Marian theology would develop across the following centuries.
He died around 450, probably in Jerusalem, where his grave at the eastern gate was still being shown to pilgrims around the year 570. A chapel was dedicated to him there. The distribution of alms was part of his feast day commemoration — the poor being fed on the day the Church remembered the man who had spent his life feeding the minds of the faithful with the Scriptures.
Prayer to Saint Hesychius
O God, who gave to Saint Hesychius the city of Jerusalem as his school and the whole of Scripture as his subject, and who trusted him to see in every sentence a mystery pointing to Christ, grant through his intercession that those who study Your word may bring to it the same total attention he brought, and may find in what they read not only what is written on the surface but what the Spirit always intended. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Saint Hesychius of Jerusalem, pray for us.
| Born | Unknown — Jerusalem, late fourth century |
| Died | c. 450 — Jerusalem — natural death; grave at the eastern gate still shown to pilgrims c. 570 |
| Feast Day | March 28 |
| Order / Vocation | Monk; priest; catechist (didascalos), Church of Jerusalem |
| Canonized | Pre-Congregation — venerated from the fifth century; Greek Menology March 28 |
| Patron of | Biblical scholars · Exegetes · Priests who teach |
| Known as | Hesychius the Priest · Hesychius the Presbyter · Hesychios of Jerusalem · Hagiopolites (the citizen of the Holy City — his citation signature in manuscripts) |
| Key writings | Commentary on the Psalms (mistakenly attributed to Athanasius of Alexandria for centuries) · Commentary on Leviticus · Commentary on Job · Scholia on Isaiah, the Minor Prophets, Ezekiel · Homilies on the Virgin Mary (earliest known liturgical Marian addresses) · Ecclesiastical History (c. 428, controverted Nestorianism) |
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