Tyconius the African

Tyconius, an African by nationality, was, it is said, sufficiently learned in sacred literature, not wholly unacquainted with secular literature, and zealous in the affairs of the church. He wrote books On the Internal War and Expositions of Various Cases, in which he cites the ancient councils in defense of his friends; and from all of these he is recognized to have been a Donatist. He also composed eight Rules for investigating and finding out the meaning of the Scriptures, compressing them into one volume. [a]

He also expounded the whole Apocalypse of John, taking nothing in it in a fleshly sense, but all in a spiritual sense. In this exposition he maintained that the angelic nature is bodily. Moreover, he doubts that there will be a reign of the righteous on earth for a thousand years after the resurrection, or that there will be two resurrections of the dead in the flesh, one of the righteous and the other of the unrighteous. He maintains instead that there will be one resurrection of all at the same time, at which even the aborted and the deformed will rise, so that no living human being, however deformed, should be lost. He does, to be sure, distinguish between the two resurrections, so as to make the first, which he calls the apocalypse of the righteous, take place only in the growth of the church, where, justified by faith, people are raised from the dead bodies of their sins through baptism to the service of eternal life; and the second, the general resurrection of all people in the flesh. This man flourished at the same period as the Rufinus mentioned above, in the reign of Theodosius and his sons.