If anyone defends the
impious Theodore of Mopsuestia, who said that God the Word is someone other
than Christ, who was troubled by the passions of the soul and the desires of
the flesh, was gradually separated from that which is worse and so because
better by progress in works and was made faultless by his way of life, and that
he was baptised as a mere man in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy
Spirit, received through baptism the grace of the Holy Spirit, was honoured
with sonship, was worshipped as representing God the Word, on the level of an
image of the emperor, and after his resurrection became immutable in his
thoughts and totally sinless – furthermore the same impious Theodore said that
the union of God the Word with Christ was of the same kind as that which the
apostle ascribed to man and woman, ‘The two will become one flesh’; and in
addition to his other innumerable blasphemies he dared to assert that, when
after the resurrection the Lord breathed on his disciples and said, ‘Receive
the Holy Spirit,’ he did not give them the Holy Spirit but breathed on them
only in semblance; and, as for the profession of Thomas, when he touched the Lord’s
hands and side after the resurrection, namely ‘My Lord and my God,’ he asserted
that this was not said by Thomas about Christ (for he says that Christ himself
was not God) but that Thomas, amazed at the extraordinary character of the resurrection,
was praising God for raising up Christ; and what is even worse is that in the
commentary he composed on the Acts of the Apostles the same Theodore, comparing
Christ to Plato, Mani, Epicurus and Marcion, says that just as each of these
men, having devised his own teaching, caused his disciples to be called
Platonists, Manichaeans, Epicureans and Marcionites, so in the same way when
Christ had devised his teaching ‘Christians’ were called after him; . . . (The
Acts of the Lateran Synod of 649 [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
2014], 276-77 [Fourth Session])
