PAUL OF SAMOSATA, patriarch of Antioch (26o-272), was, if we may credit the encyclical letter of his ecclesiastical opponents preserved in Eusebius's History, bk. vii. ch. 3o, of humble origin. The letter just mentioned is the only indisput ably contemporary document concerning him and was addressed to Dionysius and Maximus, respectively bishops of Rome and Alexandria, by seventy bishops, priests and deacons, who attended a synod at Antioch in 269 and deposed Paul. Their sentence, how ever, did not take effect until late in 272, when the emperor Aurelian, having defeated Zenobia and anxious to impose upon Syria the dogmatic system fashionable in Rome, deposed Paul and allowed the rival candidate Domnus to take his place.
Paul held that it was a man and not the divine Logos which was born of Mary. Jesus was a man who came to be God, rather than God become man. Paul's Christology therefore was of the Adop tionist type, which we find among the primitive Ebionite Chris tians of Judaea, in Hermas, Theodotus and Artemon of Rome, and in Archelaus the opponent of Mani, and in the other great doctors of the Syrian Church of the 4th and 5th centuries. Lucian the great exegete of Antioch and his school derived their inspiration from Paul, and he was through Lucian a forefather of Arianism.
Probably the Paulicians of Armenia continued his tradition, and hence their name. (See PAULICIANS.) Paul of Samosata represented the high-water mark of Christian speculation; and it is deplorable that the fanaticism of his own and of succeeding generations has left us nothing but a few scat tered fragments of his writings. Already at the Council of Nicaea in 325 the Pauliani were put outside the Church and condemned to be rebaptized. It is interesting to note that at the synod of Antioch the use of the word consubstantial to denote the relation of God the Father to the divine Son or Logos was condemned, although it afterwards became at the Council of Nicaea the watch word of the orthodox faction.