VITTORINO, bishop of PETTAU (Poetovium). — He occupied the see of Poetovium (in Styria, Upper Pannonia) toward the end of the third century and died as a martyr in 304 during the persecution of Diocletian.
According to St. Jerome (De viris ill., 74), he wrote commentaries on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Habakkuk, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, and the Apocalypse, as well as a work Adversus omnes haereses. Of this extensive literary output, the commentary on the Apocalypse has survived; its original text is found only in cod. Ottob. lat. 3288 A of the Vatican Library, whereas the other manuscripts contain the recension (and transformation) of the original text made by St. Jerome, who tempered the millenarianism of V.’s editio with the spiritualist exegesis of Ticonius. V. knew Greek and made use of the works of Papias, Origen, Irenaeus, and Hippolytus. St. Jerome’s recension was further reworked in later centuries. Another work by V. is the treatise De fabrica mundi, which discusses the week of creation and also has a millenarian character. The work Adversus omnes haereses, which St. Jerome attributes to V., is, according to Ed. Schwartz, V.’s translation of a Greek anti-heretical book, which would have been written at Rome under Pope Zephyrinus. The Latin text has been preserved in chaps. 46–53 of Tertullian’s De praescriptione haereticorum. But this hypothesis is quite fragile.