Theophylact of Ohrid on Matthew

At a Glance

The Explanation of the Gospel According to Matthew by Theophylact of Ohrid is a Byzantine Orthodox commentary written around the beginning of the twelfth century. Theophylact, Archbishop of Ohrid, presents a compact verse-by-verse reading shaped especially by John Chrysostom and the earlier Greek patristic tradition.

What It Contains

The commentary follows the Gospel text closely, explaining difficult phrases, drawing moral and ascetical applications, and connecting the passage to doctrine and the wider scriptural witness. Its voice is pastoral as well as exegetical: it was written to form Christian readers, not merely to catalogue historical information.

Voice and Context

This is a Byzantine Orthodox source, not a later Western commentary received secondhand by Orthodox readers. At the same time, it is Theophylact's authored synthesis rather than a conciliar definition or a complete anthology of patristic opinion. His frequent dependence on Chrysostom is a strength, but readers should still distinguish Theophylact's condensation and application from Chrysostom's own text.

Text and Translation Notice

StudyOrthodoxy's Matthew 5 pilot preserves the medieval Greek from the CALFA/GREgORI project's automated OCR of Patrologia Graeca 123. That OCR has not received a complete scholarly proofread and visibly contains damaged letters and word divisions.

For a more intelligible orientation aid, the English is machine-translated from the public-domain Russian edition printed at Kazan in 1874 rather than generated directly from damaged Greek OCR. This introduces an additional translation layer. It is not a published English translation and has not been reviewed by a Greek- or Russian-speaking patristics scholar.

Use the English to discover the argument, use the Greek to check what stands behind it, and consult the page scan before quoting either one in serious work.

Orthodox Use and Caution

The work is directly at home in Byzantine Orthodox exegesis and is especially valuable for seeing how a medieval Orthodox bishop received the Sermon on the Mount. Its polemical assumptions, historical claims, and compressed attributions still require careful reading. A machine translation of imperfect OCR must never be made to carry doctrinal weight by itself.

Access

The public-domain Greek is in Patrologia Graeca 123, columns 98–106. StudyOrthodoxy uses the CALFA/GREgORI mechanical OCR witness, whose maintainers explicitly describe the repository text as raw OCR awaiting further proofreading. The translation bridge is the 1874 Kazan Russian edition catalogued by the Russian State Library.