Priscillian (in Latin: Priscillianus; Gallaecia, c. 340 – Augusta Treverorum, Gallia Belgica, c. 385) was a wealthy nobleman of Roman Hispania who promoted a strict form of Christian asceticism.
The principal and almost contemporary source for the career of Priscillian is the Gallic chronicler Sulpicius Severus, who characterized him (Chronica II.46) as noble and rich, a layman who had devoted his life to study, and was vain of his classical pagan education.
[3] Although neither Priscillian nor any of his followers attended, he wrote in reply his third tract justifying the reading of apocryphal literature, without denying that their contents were partly spurious.
Michael Kulikowski characterizes the concern at Zaragoza as the relationship between town and country, and the authority of the urban episcopacy over religious practice in outlying rural areas.
[8] Consequently, the three bishops, Instantius, Salvianus and Priscillian, went in person to Rome, to present their case before Pope Damasus I, himself a native of Hispania.
Salvianus died in Rome, but through the intervention of Macedonius, the imperial magister officiorum and an enemy of Ambrose, they succeeded in procuring the withdrawal of Gratian's edict, and an order for the arrest of Ithacius.
Maximus was recognized as emperor of Britain, Gaul and Spain, and made Augusta Treverorum, in Gallia Belgica, his residence.
Sulpicius Severus notes that Martin of Tours protested to the Emperor against the ruling, which said that the accused who went to Treves should be imprisoned.
Priscillian was questioned and forced to make the confession that he studied obscene doctrines, held nocturnal meetings with shameful women, and prayed while naked.
[13] Pope Siricius, Ambrose of Milan, and Martin of Tours protested against the execution, largely on the jurisdictional grounds that an ecclesiastical case should not be decided by a civil tribunal, and worked to reduce the persecution.
On an official visit to Augusta Treverorum, Ambrose refused to give any recognition to Ithacius, "not wishing to have anything to do with bishops who had sent heretics to their death".
After the execution, Martin broke off relations with Felix, bishop of Augusta Treverorum, and all others associated with the enquiries and the trial, and restored communion only when the emperor promised to stop the persecution of the Priscillianists.
A letter dated 20 February 405, from Pope Innocent I to Exuperius, bishop of Tolosa, opposed the Priscillianists’ interpretation of the Apocrypha.
Priscillian was honored as a martyr, especially in Gallaecia (modern Galicia and northern Portugal), where his headless body was reverentially returned from Augusta Treverorum and allegedly became rediscovered and revered in the 9th century as Saint James the Great.
[2] It was long thought that all his writings had perished, but in 1885, Georg Schepss discovered at the University of Würzburg eleven genuine tracts, published in the CSEL in 1886.
According to Raymond E. Brown (1995), the source of the Comma Johanneum, a later insertion into the First Epistle of John, known since the fourth century, appears to be the Latin Liber Apologeticus by Priscillian.