St Victorinus

2^nd November is the saint’s day of Saint Victorinus, one of many Christian martyrs who suffered for their faith during the early centuries of the Christian era within the Roman Empire.

He was Bishop of Pettau in Pannonia, a province of the Empire in the Balkans. Pettau is modern-day Ptuj in north-eastern Slovenia. His date of birth is unknown, although his martyrdom probably happened around the year 303 during the reign of Emperor Diocletian.

Victorinus was noted as a theologian, and was the first to use Latin (the language of the hated Romans) as his language of choice when explaining the scriptures. He is believed to have been a prolific writer, but hardly anything he wrote has survived to the present day.

The problem that Victorinus had was that he put forward views that were considered heretical by later thinkers, and many of his works were deliberately destroyed as a result. In particular, he interpreted the “thousand years” in Revelation chapter 20 to mean that when Christ returned to Earth he would rule on Earth for a thousand years before taking the faithful to Heaven. This view runs counter to those who maintained (as many do today) that the faithful would be taken immediately and so the thousand years must be interpreted symbolically.

The passage in question is far from clear and all sorts of interpretations have been offered down the centuries. Victorinus suffered from having backed the wrong side in the debate, as far as later theologians were concerned.

However, such theoretical niceties had nothing to do with his eventual fate, the details of which are also shrouded in mystery.

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© John Welford