Home › Fathers, Saints & Teachers › St. Hippolytus
At a glance
| Who | St. Hippolytus (c. 170–c. 235), priest and theologian of the Church of Rome, the most important Christian writer in Rome in his day, who wrote in Greek. He opposed Popes Zephyrinus and Callistus and led a rival community, was exiled to Sardinia with Pope St. Pontian in 235 under the emperor Maximinus, was reconciled to the Church, and died there. |
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| Standing | Father of the Church · Saint and martyr honored with St. Pontian on August 13 |
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| The work | On Christ and Antichrist (also called the Treatise on Christ and Antichrist, c. 200), addressed to a friend named Theophilus; also his Commentary on Daniel, the oldest surviving Christian commentary on a book of the Bible |
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| Translation | S. D. F. Salmond, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 5 (1886), at New Advent |
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| Weight | An early witness who stands close to St. Irenaeus and shares much of his reading of Daniel and Revelation. Where he hands on the common faith, that a personal Antichrist will come and be destroyed by Christ, he speaks with the Fathers. His identifications of tribes, numbers and kingdoms, and his reckoning of the years of the world, are his own opinions, which the Church has not adopted. |
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Who was Hippolytus?
Much about him is uncertain. The ancient historians Eusebius and St. Jerome knew his writings but not which church he led. What can be pieced together, chiefly from his own works and from Roman records, is the story of a gifted and severe priest who broke with the popes of his day over doctrine and discipline, and was for years at the head of a rival group in Rome. Persecution reunited what controversy had divided. In 235 he and Pope Pontian were both deported to Sardinia, and according to the Roman tradition he was reconciled with the Church before his death. Their remains were brought back to Rome and buried on the same day, August 13, which is still their shared feast (Catholic Encyclopedia, “St. Hippolytus of Rome”).
Scholars still debate how many of the works under his name are his. Some have proposed that they come from two different writers named Hippolytus, one in Rome and one in the East, and the authorship of several works, among them the Apostolic Tradition, is disputed. On Christ and Antichrist and the Commentary on Daniel are among the works most widely accepted as his, and they belong together: the same author, the same method, the same reading of Daniel.
Why Hippolytus matters here
Hippolytus was a pupil of St. Irenaeus, or at least his close follower, and he carried Irenaeus's reading of the end into a whole book. He gathers the prophets, the Gospels, St. Paul and the Book of Revelation and lets them interpret one another. His purpose is that the faithful should not be caught unaware. And he writes as a man of the Church under persecution: the beast is not an abstraction to him but the power that sent Christians to the arena.
The Catechism teaches what he taught at its center: before Christ's return the Church must pass through a final trial, and “the supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist,” a false messianism in which man glorifies himself in place of God (CCC 675).
On Christ and Antichrist, section by section
Ch. 6 · The deceiver who imitates ChristPatristic teachingFutureUnfolding
“For the deceiver seeks to liken himself in all things to the Son of God.”
- Teaching
- Hippolytus sets the two side by side. “Christ is a king, so Antichrist is also a king.” “The Saviour was manifested as a lamb; so he too, in like manner, will appear as a lamb, though within he is a wolf” (ch. 6). In the same chapter he runs through the parallels: Christ sent apostles, and the Antichrist will send false apostles; Christ gathered his scattered sheep, and the Antichrist will gather a scattered people; Christ showed his risen flesh, and the Antichrist will raise up a temple of stone in Jerusalem.
- Scripture
- The second beast of Revelation “had two horns like a lamb's but spoke like a dragon” (Revelation 13:11). Jesus warned: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep's clothing, but underneath are ravenous wolves” (Matthew 7:15).
- Why two labels
- The final counterfeit is still to come (CCC 675). The pattern of counterfeit, a lamb's face and a dragon's voice, is at work in every age, wherever something less than God is offered as salvation (CCC 676).
Chs. 14–15 · From the tribe of DanPatristic opinionMystery
- His view
- Reading Jacob's blessing, “Let Dan be a serpent by the roadside, a horned viper by the path” (Genesis 49:17), Hippolytus holds that the Antichrist will come from the tribe of Dan; the judge Samson, a Danite, was only a partial fulfillment (chs. 14–15). St. Irenaeus held the same, and noted that Dan is missing from the tribes sealed in Revelation 7 (Against Heresies 5.30.2).
- Why mystery
- This is an inference from types, not a teaching of the Church, which has never said anything about the Antichrist's ancestry. It has also been misused against the Jewish people, which the Church firmly rejects (Nostra Aetate 4). This site records it as the opinion of two Fathers and goes no further.
Chs. 19–28 · Daniel's statue and beastsPatristic teachingFulfilledFutureMystery
“…the legs of iron, and the beast dreadful and terrible, expressed the Romans.” (ch. 28)
- Teaching
- Hippolytus quotes Daniel's visions of the statue and the four beasts at length (Daniel 2 and 7) and explains them in order: the lion is the Babylonians, the bear the Persians and Medes, the leopard the Greeks under Alexander (chs. 23–24), and the fourth beast, of whom he asks, “And who are these but the Romans?” (ch. 25). The ten horns are ten kings still to come, and the little horn that uproots three of them is the Antichrist, who will make war on the saints (ch. 25). And “the stone that smites the earth and brings judgment upon the world was Christ” (ch. 28).
- Where the Fathers agree
- This is the same reading as St. Irenaeus's and was shared by many Fathers: four empires ending in Rome, and the little horn as a figure of the final Antichrist. The NABRE notes read the visions within the book's own crisis under Antiochus IV. Both horizons can be held together, as the site's study of Daniel 7 explains.
- Why mystery
- The Church has not defined how the ten kings or the divided kingdom map onto later history. Every attempt to fit them to particular nations or rulers has had to be revised. This site names no one.
Chs. 43–47 · The last week and the two witnessesPatristic opinionFutureMystery
- His view
- Like Irenaeus, Hippolytus applies the last “week” of Daniel 9:27 to the end of history and divides it in two. In the first half, Enoch and Elijah, whom he identifies with the two witnesses of Revelation 11, will preach; in the second half the Antichrist will make war on the saints, after he has killed the two witnesses (chs. 43, 47; Revelation 11:3–7).
- Why mystery
- The return of Elijah before the day of the Lord (Malachi 3:23–24) and the hope of Enoch and Elijah as the two witnesses were widely held among the Fathers. The Church has not defined who the two witnesses are. See the seventy weeks.
Chs. 48–50 · The two beasts of Revelation 13 and the numberPatristic opinionFutureMystery
“By the beast, then, coming up out of the earth, he means the kingdom of Antichrist…” (ch. 49)
- His reading
- Hippolytus quotes Revelation 13:11–18 (ch. 48) and explains it (ch. 49). The second beast, from the earth, is the kingdom of the Antichrist, and its two horns are the Antichrist and the false prophet after him. The first beast, whose deadly wound was healed, is the Roman power of Daniel's fourth beast. The Antichrist will wield its authority “after the manner of the law of Augustus, by whom the empire of Rome was established,” and so the wounded power will “act with vigour again, and prove strong by reason of the laws established by him.” The image is that revived power, not a mere statue, and the mark on hand and forehead is the price of buying and selling (Revelation 13:16–17). He compares the coming persecution to that of Antiochus Epiphanes, when the faithful were forced to sacrifice (ch. 49; 1 Maccabees 1:54–64).
- The number
- “Wisdom is needed here; one who understands can calculate the number of the beast, for it is a number that stands for a person. His number is six hundred and sixty-six” (Revelation 13:18). Hippolytus mentions names whose letters add up to 666, among them Titan, Evanthas and Latinus. But he refuses to be sure: “Wherefore we ought neither to give it out as if this were certainly his name, nor again ignore the fact that he may not be otherwise designated” (ch. 50).
- Where the Fathers agree
- His caution echoes St. Irenaeus, who would not “incur the risk of pronouncing positively as to the name of Antichrist” (Against Heresies 5.30.3). The Church has never identified the number with a name. These names are the Fathers' guesses, offered as guesses.
- See also
- Revelation 13 at The Lamb's Victory.
Chs. 60–61 · The woman clothed with the sun: the ChurchPatristic teachingUnfolding
“By the woman then clothed with the sun, he meant most manifestly the Church, endued with the Father's word, whose brightness is above the sun.” (ch. 61)
- Scripture
- “A great sign appeared in the sky, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (Revelation 12:1). Hippolytus quotes the whole vision of the woman and the dragon (ch. 60) and then explains it line by line (ch. 61).
- His reading
- The moon under her feet shows the Church “being adorned, like the moon, with heavenly glory”; the twelve stars are the twelve apostles. Her labor means that “the Church will not cease to bear from her heart the Word that is persecuted by the unbelieving in the world.” The male child is Christ, “the perfect man-child of God,” whom the Church always brings forth. The two wings of the great eagle given to the woman (Revelation 12:14) are “the faith of Jesus Christ,” who stretched forth “His holy hands on the holy tree”; with them the Church flees into the desert for the 1,260 days, “(the half of the week) during which the tyrant is to reign and persecute the Church” (ch. 61).
- Why unfolding
- For Hippolytus the vision is not only about the last days: the Church is always in labor with Christ, always pursued, always protected. The Church today reads the woman as Israel, the Church and Mary together; Hippolytus is the first great witness to the reading of the woman as the Church, as St. Irenaeus is to Mary as the New Eve. See the study of Revelation 12 and the Fathers on Revelation 12.
Chs. 63–65 · The end of the AntichristPatristic teachingFuture
“…whom the Lord Jesus shall consume with the Spirit of His mouth, and shall destroy with the brightness of His coming.” (ch. 63, quoting 2 Thessalonians 2:8)
- Teaching
- The Antichrist's reign is short and his end is certain. Hippolytus quotes St. Paul on the falling away and the man of sin destroyed by the Lord at his coming (ch. 63; 2 Thessalonians 2:1–12). When the last half-week is finished, Christ comes from heaven, bringing “the conflagration and just judgment” (ch. 64); the dead are raised, some to everlasting life and some to shame, as Daniel foretold, and the saints receive the kingdom (ch. 65; Daniel 12:2; Isaiah 26:19).
- With the Church
- “The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection.” The kingdom will be fulfilled “not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God's victory over the final unleashing of evil” (CCC 677).
- Hope
- The treatise that begins with the counterfeit ends with the true King. The book is written so that those who read it will not be afraid when the trial comes. See 2 Thessalonians 2:8.
Hippolytus's Commentary on Daniel, written in the same years, contains the most famous calculation of the end in the early Church. Like St. Irenaeus, he took the six days of creation as a figure of six thousand years of history, to be followed by a seventh, a sabbath, the kingdom of the saints: “And 6,000 years must needs be accomplished, in order that the Sabbath may come, the rest, the holy day ‘on which God rested from all His works,’” for “the Sabbath is the type and emblem of the future kingdom of the saints” (On Daniel, fragment 2.4, ANF vol. 5). By his chronology, “the first appearance of our Lord in the flesh took place in Bethlehem, under Augustus, in the year 5500,” and so, he reasoned, 500 years remained from the birth of Christ to complete the six thousand (Commentary on Daniel, Book 4). On his reckoning, the end lay about three centuries beyond his own day.
It is worth seeing why he made the calculation. In the same book he tells of a bishop in Syria who misread the Scriptures and led his people out into the desert to meet Christ, and of a bishop in Pontus who trusted his own dreams and announced that the judgment was at hand; when the day did not come, their people were left in confusion and scandal. Scholars commonly read Hippolytus's count as meant to calm such panic, not to feed it: the end, he insisted, was not yet. In that he was right. But the count itself was wrong. The year 500 came and went, as every date set since has done.
Why the Church does not set datesHippolytus is honored as a saint and martyr, and his reckoning of six thousand years, with five hundred left after Christ's birth, is his own opinion, which the Church has not adopted, built on a chronology of the world that no one holds today. His example shows why the Church refuses every timetable. Jesus said, “of that day and hour no one knows” (
Matthew 24:36), and “It is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has established by his own authority” (
Acts 1:7). The Catechism teaches that Christ's coming in glory has been imminent since the Ascension, “even though ‘it is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority’” (
CCC 673). The idea of a coming earthly sabbath-kingdom is also part of the millenarian hope the Church has not adopted (CCC 676; see
St. Irenaeus on the kingdom). This site sets no date and names no one.
For reflection
Would I know the counterfeit?
Hippolytus teaches that the deceiver will look like Christ from the outside. The only sure protection is to know the real Christ, in the Gospels, in the sacraments, in the poor. How well do I know him? What one step could I take this week to know him better?
Sources
- St. Hippolytus of Rome, Treatise on Christ and Antichrist, chs. 6, 14–15, 19–28, 43–50, 60–65, trans. S. D. F. Salmond, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 5 (Buffalo, 1886), New Advent
- St. Hippolytus of Rome, On Daniel, fragment 2.4, Ante-Nicene Fathers vol. 5, Bibliothek der Kirchenväter
- Part of the Commentary of S. Hippolytus on Daniel, Greek text with introduction, notes and translation (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1888), Book 4, archive.org
- J. P. Kirsch, “St. Hippolytus of Rome,” Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), New Advent
- Catechism of the Catholic Church 673–677, vatican.va
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