Sophronius of Jerusalem and seventh-century heresy

Poet, hagiographer, dogmatician, homilist, and liturgist, Sophronius was a well-traveled monastic with close ties to Rome and an unrivalled knowledge of the workings of the anti-Chalcedonian churches, revealed in his Synodical letter. He despatched this epistle to other church leaders when, at an advanced age, he became patriarch of Jerusalem in AD 634. The letter was read at the Sixth Ecumenical Council in 680/1, and provided the only sustained rebuttal of the monoergist doctrine, later used by eastern emperors and church leaders as a political strategy to unite Christians in the early Byzantine empire. Pauline Allen provides the first complete annotated translation of the letter in English along with other translated documents of the time which illustrate the progress of the debate and its political and ecclesiastical repercussions in the first half of the seventh century.