Primary source · Latin

Pacian of Barcelona, Letters and Treatises

Name: Pacian of Barcelona, Letters and Treatises
Author: Pacian of Barcelona

Pacian of Barcelona · c. AD 375–390

What this text is

The gentlest polemicist of the century, and one immortal sentence: 'Christian is my name, Catholic my surname.' Jerome catalogued him; his son Dexter, praetorian prefect, was Jerome's dedicatee — a small corpus preserved on a slender thread.

Profile of Pacian of Barcelona →

Public-domain translations

Working translation (from the Latin)

Christianus mihi nomen est, catholicus vero cognomen — Christian is my name, Catholic my surname: the one names me, the other marks me out. (Letter 1, to Sympronian)

Manuscript witnesses

Slender medieval Latin tradition

9th c. onward

A small provincial corpus that barely made the crossing; the editio princeps (Paris, 1538) fixed the text for the early modern church.

EARLIEST WITNESSES

Editio princeps (Jean du Tillet, Paris)

1538

First printing.

PRINTED PROXY

Provenance

Barcelona; three letters to the Novatianist Sympronian, an exhortation to penance, and On Baptism

Editions & scholarship

Critical editions and standard translations behind the text above.

Iberian Fathers, vol. 3: Pacian of Barcelona, Orosius of Braga (FOTC 99)
Craig L. Hanson (tr.), 1999
Modern annotated translation.
Pacien de Barcelone: Écrits (SC 410)
Carmelo Granado (ed.), 1995
Critical text with French translation.