Augustine’s polemics caricatured Pelagius’s actual theology

Evidence

The standard English-language treatment of Pelagius and his theology, providing the framework for understanding the controversy that drove Augustine to articulate the doctrine of original sin in its mature form. Rees gives Pelagius a sympathetic reading and reconstructs the theological position (against Augustine’s later polemical caricature). Significance: necessary background for Episode 9’s account of why Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings took the form they did. Updated by Ali Bonner, The Myth of Pelagianism (2018), which further rehabilitates Pelagius and his immediate followers. — , The Rod and the Child, 11507

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the history of doctrinal ‘winners writing the history’ and to revisionist scholarship on other ‘heresies’.