Zachary Esterson: Was Fortunatianus of Aquileia the Anti-Victorinus of Pettau? Their inheritance, convergence and divergence in their regional situations

In composing his commentaries on the Gospels, fourth century Fortunatianus of Aquileia clearly inherited significant material directly from third century Victorinus of neighbouring Pettau. But other material suggests a hermeneutic very different in tradition and style, chiefly one more Origen-istic and culturally Latinzing. Whereas Victorinus tended to innovate on his ante-Nicene predecessors only slightly, Fortunatianus seems to employ an Alexandrian technique more freely. Their greatest difference is perhaps in their treatment of Antichrist and the end-times, but here too there are continuities and anomalies which beg explanation. What, asides the legalization of Christianity, had changed? What was similar and divergent in the respective situations of third century Pannonia and forth century northern Italy? Both authors are concerned with similar penetrations of Jewish rites into the Church and see Jews as equivalently threatening to Christians, albeit in subtly different ways. But Fortunatianus, innovating upon Origen, perhaps unsurprisingly employs a sharper dichotomizing that, post-Constantine, arrogates categories of ‘non-Jewish/gentile’, Greek and Latin culture to that of ‘Church’ and ‘Christian’ and that of their antithesis to ‘Synagogue’ and ‘Jewish’, perhaps under impact of a newly perceived Judeo-pagan threat under Julian (its being unclear precisely when Fortunatianus died), the very incarnation of that prophesied by Victorinus and his predecessors, whose so-called ‘millenarianism’ is otherwise by then so unfashionable. How and why does Fortunatianus appear to address these, and what is one to make of the paradoxes in the so-called ‘Aquileian’ tradition, and do they play a part in the two authors’ respectively divergent fates?