Rufinus

Rufinus , d. 395, Roman statesman, minister of Theodosius I and Arcadius . After Theodosius' death (395) he virtually ruled the Eastern Empire for Arcadius, but his attempt to marry his daughter to the young emperor was thwarted by Eutropius (d. 399). Rufinus was assassinated by Gothic mercenaries, who acted possibly on the orders of his rival Stilicho .

Rufinus (fl. 399–401?), commonly called the Syrian, author of a Liber de Fide, described in the only known MS as the work of Rufinus, priest of the province of Palestine. The fact that this work is hostile to Arianism, Origen, and the doctrine of Original Sin has led to identification of its author with the Rufinus natione Syrus, said by Marius Mercator to have corrupted the theology of Pelagius, and with the deceased priest mentioned by Celestius in his trial at Carthage in 411.

Rufinus, Tyrannius or Turranius (c.345–411), monk, historian, and translator. Born near Aquileia, he went to Egypt c.373 and for some years studied at Alexandria under Didymus the Blind. In 381 he was in Jerusalem. He had a part in founding a double monastery on the Mount of Olives. He returned to Italy in 397.

*Though he was also an original writer, Rufinus is important mainly as a translator of Greek theological works into Latin at a time when knowledge of Greek was declining in the W. His free rendering of Origen's De Principiis, the only complete text now surviving, was intended to vindicate Origen's orthodoxy. It involved Rufinus in bitter controversy with St Jerome who criticized the tendentious character of the rendering. Other works he translated include some of Origen's biblical commentaries, the Clementine Recognitions, and Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History, to which he added two further books. His commentary on the Apostles' Creed gives the earliest continuous Latin text of the 4th-cent. form of the Creed, as used at Aquileia and Rome.