Acts of the Third Council of Toledo

The acts were drawn up at the council itself and are dated the eighth day before the Ides of May in the year 627 of the Spanish era and the fourth year of King Reccared, which is 8 May 589. They consist of the king’s opening speeches; a written statement of faith, the tomus, which he handed to the bishops and which ends with the creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople and the definition of Chalcedon; the signatures of the king and of Queen Baddo; the profession of the converted Gothic bishops, clergy and nobles in a series of anathemas (numbered 23 in modern editions; this manuscript does not number them); 23 disciplinary canons; and a royal edict giving the canons the force of law.

The acts were copied into the Spanish canon-law collection known as the Hispana, and the copies differ in one place that later mattered. The manuscript linked here was written at Corbie in the ninth century; the Monumenta’s introduction to it explains that its collection is a revision of the Hispana made about 850 in the circle that produced the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals. It is one witness to the text and not a critical edition. The king’s profession and the third anathema both say that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. In the text of the creed of Constantinople itself, some copies read “from the Father and the Son” and others, including the manuscript transcribed here, only “from the Father”. Which reading stood in 589 is debated.