Timothy the Bishop

When Proterius had been put to death by the Alexandrians, Timothy, in answer to the outcry of the people, allowed himself, whether willingly or unwillingly, to be made bishop by a single bishop in place of the man who had been killed. He had been appointed illegally, and he feared that he would be deservedly deposed at the will of the people who had hated Proterius. So he declared all the bishops around him to be Nestorians, and, boldly presuming to wash out the stain on his conscience by sheer audacity, he wrote a very persuasive book to the emperor Leo. He tried to fortify it with testimonies of the fathers used in a perverted sense, going so far as to show, in order to deceive the emperor and establish his heresy, that Leo of Rome, pontiff of that city, and the Synod of Chalcedon, and all the Western bishops were Nestorians at heart. But by the grace of God the enemy of the church was refuted and overthrown at the Council of Chalcedon. He is said to be living in exile, still a leader of heresy, and this is most likely so. At the request of the brothers I translated this book of his into Latin, for the sake of learning, and put a warning at the front of it. [a]