2008 NAPS Presidential Address: The Significance of Ambrosiaster

This essay, originally presented as the Presidential Address at the May 2008 annual meeting of the North American Patristics Society, argues that the late fourth-century biblical commentator now known as “Ambrosiaster” has been an unjustly neglected figure in patristic study. Overshadowed by his better known contemporaries, such as Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine, Ambrosiaster deserves to be reexamined. His writings reveal to us the perspectives of a distinctively moderate and distinctively Roman clergyman active at Rome in the early 380s. His peculiarities as a writer—that is, both his deliberate anonymity and his tendency to revise his own writings—are illuminating, as are his reflections on church practice, clerical authority, and priestly celibacy.