The original Faculty of Theology of the old University of Mainz, founded on 1 October 1477—the same day as the Tübingen Faculty—was relatively small, as the older Mainz monastic schools were incorporated into the theological curriculum. Initially, there were only two chairs, each held by a representative of the via antiqua and via moderna. Among the first appointments was Jakob Welder from Siegen (1434–1483), who served as the first rector of the university and founded the university library. A successor in the rectorate, the canon law scholar Ivo Wittich, established at the beginning of the sixteenth century the first professorship in historical studies at any German university, reflecting the humanist spirit that shaped the university in its early decades.

During the period of Jesuit control and the post-1648 crisis, Protestant students were forbidden to study in Mainz. It was only with the so-called Bentzel Reform of 1784 that the university opened its doors to Jews and Protestants, and within a short period became one of the largest Catholic universities in Europe, with as many as ten theology chairs. The revolution and the Mainz Republic led to the temporary downgrading of the university into a “central school” and the relocation of the theology chairs to the seminary (from 1877 the Philosophical-Theological College). With the move to the current campus on 22 May 1946, alongside the already existing Roman Catholic chairs, a Faculty of Protestant Theology was established, which from the outset included a chair with a focus on the Early Church.
The first holder of the chair was Walther Völker (1946–1961, died 1988), whose works on Clement and Origen of Alexandria, Maximus the Confessor, Symeon, and Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite remain standard references in Greek patristics. Völker was also famously untroubled by the culinary achievements of Rheinhessen and the Rheingau. He was succeeded in 1962 by Rudolf Lorenz (until 1979), whose dogmatic-historical approach to the major theological controversies of the fourth century (Arius and Athanasius) long shaped the perception of German patristic scholarship.
His successor, Gerhard May (d. 2007), brought somewhat different emphases and additionally served from 1994 to 2004 as Director of the Department of Western Religious History at the Institute for European History. Following early research on Gregory of Nyssa and the Cappadocians, his habilitation on the beginnings of patristic doctrines of creation revealed connections between dogma, ethics, and ecclesiology in the early Church—connections that would shape his life’s work, particularly his research on Marcion and his contemporaries.
(Obituary for Gerhard May, August 2007)
Since the summer semester of 2008, Ulrich Volp has held the chair.