When the ancient Christians were about to travel into a foreign country, they took with them letters of credence from their own bishop, in order that they might communicate with another church. These letters were of three kinds: epistole commendatoriae, given to persons of quality, or persons whose reputation had been called in question, or to the clergy who had occasion to travel into foreign countries; epistola communicatoriae, given to such as were in peace and communion with the Church; epistolae dimissoriae, such as were given by the bishops to the clergy when removing from one diocese to another. All these were called epistolae formatae, because they were written in a peculiar form, with certain marks, which served to distinguish them from counterfeits. Farrar, Ecclesiastes ,Dictionary, s.v.; Bingham, Orig. Eccl. book 2, chapter 4.<\/p>\n
Epistolae When the ancient Christians were about to travel into a foreign country, they took with them letters of credence from their own bishop, in order that they might communicate with another church. These letters were of three kinds: epistole commendatoriae, given to persons of quality, or persons whose reputation had been called in question, … Continue reading “Epistolae”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-encyclopedic-dictionary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45948\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.biblia.work\/dictionaries\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}