Eliya ibn ʿUbaid

Three works by Eliya survive: the Agreements of the Creed (Arabic Ijtimāʿ al-amānah), the Consolation of Sorrows (Arabic Tasliyat al-aḥzān) and a collection of canons of the "fathers of the east".[2]

The Consolation of Sorrows has been published and translated into Italian.[3] It was a popular text and survives in eight manuscripts. It is a philosophical text inspired by and quoting liberally from the Art of Dispelling Sorrows of the Muslim philosopher al-Kindī. It is written in the form of a letter to an anonymous Christian friend who had fallen into disgrace. Two individual Christians who fell into disgrace in Eliya's time are mentioned by name: Abū Ayyūb and Abū l-Qāsim. These are probably to be identified with Abū Ayyūb Sulaymān ibn Wahb and his son Abū l-Qāsim ʿUbayd Allāh ibn Sulaymān who both served for periods in the vizierate of the Abbasid Caliphate and were both arrested and imprisoned in 878 or 879.[2] Since Eliya was not yet a bishop when he wrote and was living in the vicinity of Baghdad at the time, narrowing the timeframe of writing to the same period of 878–79.[4] The Consolation of Sorrows can be divided into two parts. The first is philosophical and rationalistic, including references to Socrates, Aristotle and Alexander's letter to his mother. The second is exegetical. The stories of figures from the Old Testament who overcame adversity are apparently written from memory.[2]

Eliya compiled a list of the dioceses of the Church of the East in Arabic. This list is of immense value to the historian, but it is not a complete list.[5] It does not include the dioceses of the province of China or the province of India, perhaps because metropolitans were no longer being sent to them. The church in China had suffered severely in the Great Anti-Buddhist Persecution of 845 and the Guangzhou massacre of 878.[6] Eliya's list includes a total of fifteen provinces, which he calls "eparchies": the province of the Patriarch, the six other provinces of the interior and the eight provinces of the exterior (seven in the east and one, Eliya's own, in the west). Since Eliya wrote in Arabic, while the official records of the church were kept in Syriac, there is some uncertainty regarding the identification of some dioceses.[5]

Eliya wrote the oldest surviving list of patriarchs of the Church of the East, although it only survives in a thirteenth-century manuscript (Vatican Library, Cod. Arab. 157, Fol. 82r). The list of Eliya of Nisibis survives in an older copy.[7] Eliya of Damascus is the first historian to record—and may himself have fabricated—the existence of five apocryphal early patriarchs with the dates of their pontificates: Abris (120–137), Abraham (159–171), Yaʿqob I (190), Aha d'Abuh (204–220) and Shahlufa (220–224). The last two are in fact late third-century bishops of Erbil who were transferred forward in time and upward in office. All five became generally accepted in the historiography of the Church of the East. The first three acquired backstories that made them relatives of Jesus' earthly father, Joseph.[8] Eliya also placed the historical patriarch Tomarsa in the middle of the third century, to fill a gap between Shahlufa and Papa, whose reign began around 280. Unlike his other error, however, this one did not catch on.[8]