Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II/Volume III/Lives of Illustrious Men/Gennadius/Timotheus the bishop
Chapter LXXIII.
Timotheus,[1] [2] when Proterius[3] had been put to death by the Alexandrians, in response to popular clamour, willingly or unwillingly allowed himself to be made bishop by a single bishop in the place of him who had been put to death. And lest he, having been illegally appointed, should be deservedly deposed at the will of the people who had hated Proterius, he pronounced all the bishops of his vicinity to be Nestorians, and boldly presuming to wash out the stain on his conscience by hardihood, wrote a very persuasive book to the Emperor Leo, which he attempted to fortify by testimonies of the Fathers, used in a perverted sense, so far as to show, for the sake of deceiving the emperor and establishing his heresy, that Leo of Rome, pontiff of the city, and the synod of Chalcedon, and all the Western bishops were fundamentally Nestorians. But by the grace of God, the enemy of the church was refuted and overthrown at the Council of Chalcedon. He is said to be living in exile, still an heresiarch, and it is most likely so. This book of his for learning’s sake, I translated by request of the brethren into Latin and prefixed a caveat.[4]