BACHIARIO. - An ecclesiastical writer of the early 5th 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 case of a monk and deacon who had fallen into sin with a consecrated virgin. In De fide he presents to Rome his own profession of faith regarding 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 Scripture, and the apocrypha. These are the well-known themes of anti-Priscillianist symbols.
According to Gennadius, B. was a monk, and from his writings he appears to have been a deacon himself and perhaps even an abbot. A Spaniard, or more precisely a Galician, he had suffered hostility and accusations on suspicion of Priscillianist leanings and sympathies. Thus, shortly after the Synod of Toledo in 400, which had officially readmitted the Galicians into communion with the Catholic bishops, he would have acted as the spokesman for his fellow countrymen to defend them against the accusations and suspicions that continued to mount against them in Rome, especially from the bishops of Baetica and Carthaginensis. It is undeniable that his writings have an orthodox appearance, and one must be very subtle to detect signs of a truly Priscillianist and Origenist spirit in them.
Several scholars have also thought that B. was a bishop, and as such have sought to identify him with the mysterious Peregrinus episcopus, the reviser and editor of the Canones epistularum Pauli Apostoli of Priscillian (containing the famous Johannine comma). Peregrinus also seems to have compiled into a single corpus the various books of the Latin Vulgate of Jerome. Others have attempted to claim other anonymous treatises for this obscure figure, of whom Gennadius himself confessed to having found no other of the "grata opuscula" attributed to him outside of De fide.
For particular hypotheses: A. A. Lapòtre, La «Cena Cypriani» et ses émigres. X: l'auteur, in Recherches de science religieuse, 3 (1912), pp. 595 seq. and J. Duhr, Le «De fide» de Bacharius, in Rev. d'hist. ecclé., 24 (1928), pp. 5 seq. 301 seq. (he would be the author of the De cena Cypriani, the De Sodoma, the De Iona, 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 Iannarum, which would be the same Gennaro addressed in the Epistola. G. Morin, Paget inédites de l'écrivain espagnol Bacharius, in Bull. d'an. litt. et d'arch. chrét., 4 (1914), p. 117 seq., believes him to have been the redactor of two letters from a Spanish nun in the Sangallese codex 190. Mac Inerry, St. Mochta and Bacharius, Dublin 1923, has sought 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 seq.; Th. Stangel, Zu Bacharius, in Berliner Philol. Wochenschrift, 37 (1917), pp. 868 seq., 912 seq., 966 seq.; J. De Bruyne, Etudes sur la Vulgata en Espagne, in Rev. Bénéd., 31 (1919), p. 373 seq.; L. M. Bover, Bacharius Peregrinus?, in Estudios eclesiásticos, 7 (1928), p. 361 seq.; Ad. d'Ales, Priscillien et l'Espagne chrétienne, Paris 1936, p. 134 seq.; J. Madoz, Una nueva redacción del «Libellus de Fide» de Baquiaro, in Revista española de teología, 1 (1941), p. 457 seq. (important).