BRYENNIOS. - Two “Orthodox” ecclesiastics of this name.
IÖSEPH, celebrated Byzantine controversialist, who lived between 1350 and 1439 and was little known in the West in the past. After preaching Greek Orthodoxy in Crete and teaching it from 1395 at the Monastery of Studios, he was appointed court preacher in Constantinople in 1404. In 1416 and 1418 he was sent to the West to negotiate the union, where he displayed great activity against the Latin Church. Having fallen into disgrace, he withdrew from public life. His works were published in Leipzig (1468–84), in 3 vols., by Eugenio Bulgaris.
Among his writings are 21 discourses on the Most Holy Trinity, delivered between 1420 and 1430, and the conference held at Candia on the procession of the Holy Spirit.
PHILOTHEOS, ecclesiastic, born in Constantinople in 1833, died in 1914. He studied in Leipzig, Berlin, and Munich; from 1861 he taught Church history and biblical exegesis at Chalki; he was director of the patriarchal school of Constantinople from 1867, metropolitan of Serres (Macedonia) in 1875, and of Nicomedia in 1877. In 1875 he represented his Church at the Old Catholic conference (v.) in Bonn.
His greatest renown derives from having discovered, in a parchment codex of 1056 in the library of the Hospice of the Holy Sepulchre in Constantinople, now located in the library of the Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the text of the First Letter of Clement of Rome, published in 1875, and above all of the Didaché, published in 1883 (v. DIDACHÉ). Nicola Turchi