Philoxenus of Mabbug (Syriac: ܐܟܣܢܝܐ ܡܒܘܓܝܐ, Aksenāyâ Mabûḡāyâ) (died 523), also known as Xenaias and Philoxenus of Hierapolis, was one of the most notable Syriac prose writers and a vehement champion of Miaphysitism.
He was born, probably in the third quarter of the 5th century, at Tahal, a village in the district of Beth Garmaï east of the Tigris. He was thus by birth a subject of Persia, but all his active life of which we have any record was passed in the territory of the Byzantine Empire. The statements that he had been a slave and was never baptized appear to be malicious inventions of his theological opponents. He was educated at Edessa, perhaps in the famous "school of the Persians," which was afterwards (in 489) expelled from Edessa on account of its connection with Nestorianism.
The years which followed the Council of Chalcedon (451) were a stormy period in the Syrian Church. Philoxenus soon attracted notice by his strenuous advocacy of Miaphysitism.
When Calandio, the Chalcedonian patriarch of Antioch, was expelled by the Miaphysite Peter the Fuller in 485, Philoxenus was ordained bishop of Mabbug. It was probably during the earlier years of his episcopate that Philoxenus composed his thirteen homilies on the Christian life.
Later he devoted himself to the revision of the Syriac versions of the Bible, and with the help of his chorepiscopus Polycarp produced in 508 the so-called Philoxenian version, which was in some sense the received Bible of the Syrian Miaphysites during the 6th century. In the meantime he continued his ecclesiastical activity, working as a bitter opponent of Flavian II, who was patriarch of Antioch from 498 to 512 and accepted the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon.