Gelasius I°

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GELASIUS I°

GELASIUS I °, pope, 492–6. A council convened in Rome by Gelasius in 494 established the Catholic canon of biblical texts. On a personal level, Gelasius was not hostile to the Jews; among his favorites was a Jew, Telesinus, who won the pope's trust to the extent that in 495 Gelasius recommended Telesinus' nephew, the Jew Antius or Antonius, to the bishop Quinigesius. In 496, when the pope was apprised that the slave of a Jew had claimed that, although he had been a Christian from childhood, his Jewish master had forced him to be circumcised, Gelasius ordered the investigators to act with scrupulous justice so that religious interests should not be wronged nor the slave unfairly removed from his master's authority.

bibliography:

Vogelstein-Rieger, 127f.; B. Blumenkranz, Auteurs chrétiens latins (1963), 48f.

[Bernhard Blumenkranz]

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