Eliya I of Seleucia-Ctesiphon

Mar Eliya I
Patriarch of All the East
Church	Church of the East
See	Seleucia-Ctesiphon
Installed	1028
Term ended	1049
Predecessor	Ishoyahb IV
Successor	Yohannan VII
Other post(s)	Bishop of Tirhan
Personal details
Died	1049
Buried	Greek Palace, Baghdad

Eliya I (Syriac: ܐܠܝܐ) was Patriarch of the Church of the East from 1028 to 1049. He is also known as the author of an early grammar of Syriac written around the year 1000.

Sources

Brief accounts of Eliya's patriarchate are given in the Ecclesiastical Chronicle of the Jacobite writer Bar Hebraeus (fl. 1280) and in the ecclesiastical histories of the Nestorian writers Mari (twelfth-century), ʿAmr ibn Mattā and Ṣalībā ibn Yūḥannā (fourteenth-century). A modern assessment of his reign can be found in David Wilmshurst's The Martyred Church.^[1]

Eliya's patriarchate

The following account of Eliya's patriarchate is given by Bar Hebraeus:

He [Ishoʿyahb IV] was succeeded by Eliya I, formerly bishop of Tirhan, a man of advanced age and a learned doctor. He introduced the rite of genuflection on the holy Sunday of Pentecost, which the Nestorians previously did not observe. At the end of his life he was afflicted by a paralysis of his limbs and was confined to bed. He was consecrated on the third Sunday of the Apostles, on the seventh day of the third month of the Arabs in the year 419 [AD 1028/9] in the Greek Palace in Baghdad. His election was conducted by the drawing of lots. He died after fulfilling his office for twenty-one years, and was buried in the Greek Palace on the Sunday after Ascension, on the seventh day of iyyar [May] in the year 440 of the Arabs [AD 1048/9].^[2]

His secretary was the famous polymath Ibn al-Tayyib.^[3]

References

^ Wilmshurst, The Martyred Church, 201–2
^ Bar Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle (ed. Abeloos and Lamy), ii. 286–8
^ Thomas, David Richard (Jan 2001). Syrian Christians Under Islam: The First Thousand Years. Brill. ISBN 9789004120556.

Bibliography

Abbeloos, J. B., and Lamy, T. J., Bar Hebraeus, Chronicon Ecclesiasticum (3 vols, Paris, 1877)
Assemani, J. A., De Catholicis seu Patriarchis Chaldaeorum et Nestorianorum (Rome, 1775)
Brooks, E. W., Eliae Metropolitae Nisibeni Opus Chronologicum (Rome, 1910)
Gismondi, H., Maris, Amri, et Salibae: De Patriarchis Nestorianorum Commentaria I: Amri et Salibae Textus (Rome, 1896)
Gismondi, H., Maris, Amri, et Salibae: De Patriarchis Nestorianorum Commentaria II: Maris textus arabicus et versio Latina (Rome, 1899)
Wilmshurst, David (2011). The martyred Church: A History of the Church of the East. London: East & West Publishing Limited. ISBN 9781907318047.

Church of the East titles
Preceded by Ishoʿyahb IV (1020–1025) Vacant (1025–1028)	Catholicos-Patriarch of the East (1028–1049)	Succeeded by Yohannan VII (1049–1057)