BACHIARIO. — Ecclesiastical writer of the beginning of the fifth century. He is the author of two important treatises, 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 to Rome his 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 symbols.
According to Gennadio, B. was a monk, and from his writings he seems to have been himself a deacon and perhaps an abbot. A Spaniard, more precisely a Galician, he had consequently suffered hostility and accusations on suspicion of Priscillianist affiliations and sympathies. Thus, shortly after the Synod of Toledo in 400, which had officially readmitted the Galicians to communion with the Catholic bishops, he would have acted as spokesman for his compatriots in defending them against the accusations and suspicions that continued to gather in Rome against them on the part of the bishops of Baetica and Carthaginensis. It is undeniable that his writings have an orthodox appearance, and considerable subtlety is required to find in them the signs of a genuinely Priscillianist and Origenist soul.
Several have also thought that B. was a bishop, and have accordingly wished to identify him with the mysterious Peregrinus episcopus, reviser and editor of Priscillian’s Canones epistularum Pauli Apostoli (which contain the famous comma Iohanneum). Peregrinus also seems to have collected the various books of the Hieronymian Latin Vulgate into a single corpus. Still others have sought to claim for this obscure personage other anonymous treatises, although Gennadio had already confessed that, apart from De fide, he had found none of the other grata opuscula 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 De cœna Cypriani, De Sodoma, De Iona, and the Epistola ad Turasium, and would have written De fide around 384 against St. Jerome). Fr. Florio attempted to attribute to him the pseudo-Augustinian De Incarnatione Verbi ad Iauvarum, who would be the same Gennaro addressed by 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 to have been the redactor of the two letters of a Spanish religious woman in Codex Sangallensis 190. Mac Inerny, St. Mochta and Bacharius, Dublin 1923, sought to identify him with Bacharius, bishop of Seville in the seventh 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 ff., 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 ff. (important).