The First Antipope

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Mar 30, 2026 | In Lives of the Popes

Previous installment

The first four of the six popes covered in this installment found themselves in conflict with a priest named Hippolytus, the most brilliant intellectual of the Roman Church at the time. Hippolytus would become the first antipope in the history of the Church, plaguing three successive papacies with his schism. Yet his story has a happy and even poetic ending.

15—St. Zephyrinus (198-217)

The previous installment concluded with Christians enjoying peace and favor under the reign of the Emperor Commodus. Nonetheless, Commodus’s reign is regarded as having ended the Pax Romana, the two-century golden age of the Roman Empire. His assassination was followed by the infamous Year of the Five Emperors in 193, during which Rome was plunged into civil war, with multiple rulers succeeding one after another. The final victor was Septimius Severus, who reigned from 193 to 211.

Like Commodus, Severus was well-disposed toward Christians in his early reign. Christian officials continued to serve in the imperial court. The emperor kept in the palace a Christian named Proculus, who he believed had healed him from an illness by anointing him with oil, and he also employed a Christian wet nurse for his infant son, Caracalla. With Severus protecting high-ranking Christians against pagan animosity, Christianity was able to spread in the city of Rome, including among the upper classes.

Unfortunately, Severus departed from his initially favorable attitude toward the Christians and began a persecution during the pontificate of St. Zephyrinus, a pope of Roman birth. While Zephyrinus was not a martyr strictly speaking, he suffered much for the faith. According to the historian Eusebius, he strongly opposed heresy, defended the divinity of Christ, and did much to console his flock during the persecution by Severus.

St. Zephyrinus’s care for the Church is demonstrated in two instances. It seems, based on complaints from Tertullian during his Montanist period, that after initially recognizing the Montanist movement as legitimate, St. Zephyrinus then (correctly) changed his mind and revoked that recognition. More happily, in the case of a schismatic adoptionist bishop named Natalius who repented and wanted to reconcile with the Church, St. Zephyrinus allowed him to return to communion after doing serious penance.

Not everyone thought St. Zephyrinus was doing enough to fight heresy, though. The Roman priest Hippolytus was at this time an ardent opponent of Monarchianism, a heresy which said that only the Father was God, as well as of Patripassianism, which took this to the extreme of saying that because the Father and the Son were the same, it was the Father who had suffered on the Cross. (This position is also known as modalism or Sabellianism.) Between Hippolytus and the bishop of Rome a controversy arose, described by the Catholic Encyclopedia as follows:

Zephyrinus said simply that he acknowledged only one God, and this was the Lord Jesus Christ, but it was the Son, not the Father, Who had died. This was the doctrine of the tradition of the Church. Hippolytus urged that the pope should approve of a distinct dogma which represented the Person of Christ as actually different from that of the Father and condemned the opposing views of the Monarchians and Patripassians. However, Zephyrinus would not consent to this. The result was that Hippolytus grew constantly more irritated and angry against the pope and particularly against the deacon Callistus whom, as the councillor of the pope, he made responsible for the position of the latter. When after the death of Zephyrinus Callistus was elected Roman bishop, Hippolytus withdrew from the Church with his scholars, caused a schism, and made himself a rival bishop.

Thus Hippolytus supplies us with an early example of a kind of fall we still see today, when someone grows so impatient with the authorities of the Church for not condemning heresy as strongly as he thinks they should, that he ironically ends up going into schism himself.

16—St. Callistus I (217-222)

Our sources for St. Callistus’s life are unfortunately the writings of his enemies, the schismatics Tertullian and Hippolytus. Aside from seeing Callistus as a rival for the papacy, Hippolytus disagreed with his receiving repentant heretics, schismatics, murderers, and adulterers back into communion with the Church.

It seems, at any rate, that Callistus was born a slave in Rome (he apparently was born and died in the neighborhood of Trastevere). His Christian master, Carpophorus, put him in charge of certain funds, which the young Callistus lost and then fled to avoid punishment. Despite jumping overboard a ship to escape his pursuers, he was caught and taken back to his master, then released in order that he might recover the money. While attempting to either borrow money or collect some debts from some Jews at a synagogue (it was said he got into a brawl), he was denounced as a Christian, arrested again, and exiled to work in the salt mines on the island of Sardinia.

Callistus was one of the Christians released from his sentence by Commodus due to the efforts of Marcia and Pope St. Victor, mentioned in the previous installment. Recovering from ill health, Callistus lived in Antium for a time while being supported by a pension sent by the pope.

Pope St. Zephyrinus called Callistus to Rome and placed him in charge of the Christian cemetery now known as the catacombs of St. Callistus. Callistus was made archdeacon, he became the chief influence on the policies of the pope, and after St. Zephyrinus’s death he was elected pope by the Christians of Rome.

Hippolytus and Tertullian, those infamous rigorists, attacked St. Callistus for alleged laxity in many matters, especially for his readiness to receive heretics and sinners back into the Church if they repented. Hippolytus also accused the pope of being a modalist (that is, of believing that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not really distinct persons), yet Pope Callistus excommunicated Sabellius for teaching that precise doctrine.

There was another interesting policy criticized by Hippolytus. Callistus allowed nobles to marry slaves, which Roman law forbade. This was an early example of the Church’s longstanding insistence on the right of adult men and women to marry one another and choose a spouse without interference by the civil authorities—which in turn implies that it is the Church, not the state, which has supreme authority in regulating marriage (for an extensive treatment of this topic, see Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Arcanum).

Pope St. Callistus I is said to have died as a martyr, but perhaps this was not at the hands of the Roman state, since Emperor Severus Alexander did not persecute the Church. The Catholic Encyclopedia remarks, “If we knew more of St. Callistus from Catholic sources, he would probably appear as one of the greatest of the popes.”

17—St. Urban I (222-30)

We know almost nothing for certain about St. Urban, though there are many legends, including that he baptized St. Valerian, the husband of St. Cecilia. He was born in Rome and ruled during a time of relative peace. Pope Urban continued to oppose the schism of Hippolytus. Though there is a later tradition of St. Urban’s martyrdom, he likely died of natural causes since there was no persecution under Alexander Severus, who indeed even protected Christians at times.

18—St. Pontian (230-35)

St. Pontian, a Roman citizen, is known to have led a synod which concurred with the condemnation of the brilliant yet heterodox theologian Origen of Alexandia by Demetrius, Patriarch of Alexandria.

The two most important facts about St. Pontian, however, are that he was the first pope ever to resign his office, and that he helped to end the schism of Hippolytus, who had been, as tradition has it, the first antipope.

These two facts are connected, for Emperor Maximinus Thrax, beginning a fresh persecution in 235, exiled both men to work in the salt mines on the island of Sardinia, which was considered a death sentence. Under these dire circumstances, Hippolytus was reconciled with the papacy in the person of St. Pontian, bringing the schism to an end. In order to allow the election of a new pope back in Rome, Pontian abdicated his office on September 28, 235. Both men then died as martyrs in exile; some accounts say that St. Pontian was beaten to death with sticks. Thus, amazingly, pope and anti-pope share a feast day on August 13.

(Learn more about St. Hippolytus of Rome on Way of the Fathers.)

19—St. Anterus (235-6)

St. Anterus, a Greek, had the shortest reign of any pope up to his time, lasting only forty days. The tradition of his martyrdom is uncertain, since a 4^th-century document says he “fell asleep”, an expression referring to a natural death. He was the first pope to be buried in the Catacomb of Callistus (though St. Pontian’s body would be moved there by the next pope).

20—St. Fabian (236-50)

St. Fabian was a Roman nobleman and farmer. The Church historian Eusebius of Caesarea, born about a decade after Fabian’s death, relates the following story about his election:

They say that Fabianus having come, after the death of Anteros, with others from the country, was staying at Rome, and that while there he was chosen to the office through a most wonderful manifestation of divine and heavenly grace.

For when all the brethren had assembled to select by vote him who should succeed to the episcopate of the church, several renowned and honorable men were in the minds of many, but Fabianus, although present, was in the mind of none. But they relate that suddenly a dove flying down lighted on his head, resembling the descent of the Holy Spirit on the Savior in the form of a dove.

Thereupon all the people, as if moved by one Divine Spirit, with all eagerness and unanimity cried out that he was worthy, and without delay they took him and placed him upon the episcopal seat.

There is a tradition that Pope Fabian established the four minor orders of the clergy (acolyte, exorcist, lector, and porter), that he divided Rome into seven regions with seven deacons presiding over them, that he had seven subdeacons collect the records of the trials of the martyrs, and that he had monuments to the martyrs erected in the catacombs. At the very least, he certainly oversaw greater development of the cemeteries, and he is said to have sent for the bodies of Sts. Pontian and Hippolytus to be brought back from their Sardinian exile.

Origen of Alexandria corresponded with Pope St. Fabian, sending him a document in which, depending on which source you follow, he either repented of some of his errors or defended his own orthodoxy. Fabian also ordained the priest Novatian, who would become the second antipope in the Church’s history, in rebellion against Fabian’s successor.

St. Gregory of Tours, in his sixth-century History of the Franks, wrote that Pope St. Fabian sent out seven “apostles to the Gauls” in 245. One of these missionaries was St. Denis (Dionysius) of Paris, one of that city’s patron saints.

St. Fabian’s reign for the most part coincided with a period of peace for the Church, but he died a martyr under Emperor Decius, who initiated the first empire-wide persecution of Christians. His contemporary, St. Cyprian of Carthage, wrote that the glory of St. Fabian’s martyrdom “answered the purity and holiness of his life.”