Hippolytus of Rome

The most learned Christian writer of third-century Rome, Hippolytus wrote in Greek in a Church that was turning to Latin. He judged Pope Callixtus too lenient towards repentant sinners and had himself elected against him; the label "antipope" is a nineteenth-century reconstruction, and the ancient sources make him only a priest. In 235 the emperor Maximinus deported both rival leaders, Hippolytus and Pope Pontian, to the mines of Sardinia. Pontian abdicated there on 28 September, and both died there; their bodies returned to Rome together, and the Church keeps their feast on the same day. The Apostolic Tradition, long given as his, is today held by scholarship to be a composite compilation.