Bryennios, Philotheos

BRYENNIOS, brî-en´´nî´es, PHILOTHEOS, fî´´lo-thê´es: Greek metropolitan of Nicomedia; b. at Constantinople March 26 (old style), 1833. He was educated at the "Theological School in Chalce of the great Church of Christ" (1856), and the universities of Leipsic, Berlin, and Munich. In 1861 he became professor of ecclesiastical history, exegesis, and other studies at Chalce, of which he was appointed master and director in 1863, although he soon resigned the latter positions. In 1867 he was called to Constantinople to be the head of the "Great School of the Nation" in the Phanar, or Greek quarter of Constantinople, and remained there until in 1875 he was sent by the Most Holy Synod of metropolitans and patriarchs to the Old Catholic conference at Bonn, where he received the patriarchal letter announcing his appointment as metropolitan of Serrae in Macedonia. In 1877 he was transferred to the metropolitan see of Nicomedia, and three years later went to Bucharest as commissioner of the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchal and other independent churches, to decide concerning the Greek monasteries which had been plundered in Moldavia and Wallachia. In 1882, at the instance of the Holy Synod of Metropolitans in Constantinople, and the patriarch Joachim Ill., he wrote a reply to the encyclical letter of Pope Leo XIII. concerning the Slavic apostles Cyrillus and Methodius, which was published at Constantinople in 1882 with the approbation and at the expense of the Holy Synod. His fame rests upon his discovery in 1873 in the Jerusalem Monastery of the Most Holy Sepulcher in the Greek quarter of Constantinople of a manuscript containing (1) a synopsis of the Old and New Testaments in the order given by St. Chrysostom; (2) The Epistle of Barnabas; (3) The First Epistle of Clement of Rome to the Corinthians; (4) The Second Epistle of Clement to the Corinthians; (5) The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles; (6) The spurious letter of Mary of Cassoboli; and (7) Twelve pseudo-Ignatian Epistles. He edited the Epistles to the Corinthians with prolegomena and notes at Constantinople in 1875, and published the "Teaching of the Twelve Apostles" in the same city in 1883. See Didache.

Bibliography: P. Schaff, Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, pp. 8–9, 289–295, New York, 1890.