Bacchiaro

BACCHIARO. - Ecclesiastical writer of the early 5th century. He is the author of two important short works, De fide and De reparatione lapsi. In the latter he addresses Gennaro, abbot of a monastery, pleading the cause of a monk and deacon who had fallen into sin with a consecrated virgin. In De fide he presents at Rome his own profession of faith concerning the Trinity, the Incarnation, the origin of souls, the nature of man, the resurrection of the flesh, the nature and origin of demons, fasting, the canon of the scriptures, and the apocrypha. These are the well-known themes of the anti-Priscillianist creeds.

According to Gennadius, B. was a monk, and from his writings he seems himself to have been a deacon and perhaps an abbot. A Spaniard, indeed properly a Galician, as such he had suffered hostility and accusations on suspicion of Priscillianist allegiances and sympathies. Thus, shortly after the Synod of Toledo of 400, which had officially readmitted the Galicians into the communion of the Catholic bishops, he would have acted as the spokesman of his countrymen to defend them from the accusations and suspicions that never ceased to gather at Rome against them on the part of the bishops of Baetica and Carthaginensis. It is undeniable that his writings have an orthodox appearance, and it takes subtlety to find in them the signs of a soul truly Priscillianist and Origenist.

Several have also thought that B. was a bishop, and as such have wished to identify him with the mysterious Peregrinus episcopus, reviser and editor of the Canones epistularum Pauli Apostoli of Priscillian (containing the famous Comma Johanneum). Peregrinus seems also to have gathered into a single corpus the various books of the Jerome's Latin Vulgate. Others again have sought to claim other anonymous short works for this obscure figure, of whom Gennadius already confessed that he had found, outside the De fide, no other of the grata opuscula that were attributed to him.

For particular hypotheses v. A. Lapôtre, La «Cena Cypriani» et ses enigmes. X: l'auteur, in Recherches de science religieuse, 3 (1912), pp. 595 ff. and J. Duhr, Le «De fide» de Bacharius, in Rev. d'hist. ecclés., 24 (1928), pp. 5 ff., 301 ff. (he would be the author of the De cœna Cypriani, of the De Sodoma, of the De Iona, of the Epistola ad Turasium, and would have written the De fide around 384 against St. Jerome). Fr. Florio attempted to attribute to him the pseudo-Augustinian De Incarnatione Verbi ad Iauvarum, which would be the same Gennaro, recipient of the Epistola. G. Morin, Puges inédites de l'écrivain espagnol Bacharius, in Bull. d'anc. hitt. et d'arch. chrét., 4 (1914), p. 117 ff., believes him the redactor of the two letters of a Spanish nun in the Sangallese codex 190. Mac Inerny, St. Mochta and Bacharius, Dublin 1923, has wished to identify him with the Bacharius bishop of Seville of the 7th century. For the relations between B. and Peregrinus v. Priscilliani quae supersunt, ed. Schepss, in CSEL, 18, p. 107 ff.; Th. Stangl, Zu Bacharius, in Berliner Philol. Wochenschrift, 37 (1917), pp. 868 ff., 912 f., 966 ff.; J. De Bruyne, Etudes sur la Volgata en Espagne, in Rev. Bénéd., 31 (1919), p. 373 ff.; L. M. Bover, Bacharius Peregrinus?, in Estudios eclesiásticos, 7 (1928), p. 361 ff.; Ad. d'Alès, Priscillien et l'Espagne chrétienne, Paris 1936, p. 134 ff.; J. Madoz, Una nueva redacción del «Libellus de Fide» de Baquiario, in Revista española de teología, 1 (1941), p. 457 f. (important).