Aba I

Mar Aba I, commonly called Mar Abba the Great, served as Catholicos-Patriarch of the Church of the East from 540 until his death in 552. He was born at Hala (also spelled Hale) in Mesopotamia, in the Sasanian province of Beth Aramaye, to a family that practiced Zoroastrianism. In early adulthood he was employed as a secretary to the governor of that province. His conversion to Christianity took place while he was already a grown man and a public official; in Sasanian law, abandonment of Zoroastrianism was a capital offense, and his baptism therefore exposed him to lasting danger from the Magian clergy and from the state. After becoming a Christian he left secular service and gave himself to study and to an austere manner of life.

He received his theological formation at the School of Nisibis, then the foremost academy of the East Syriac church, where he was associated with the tradition of Abraham of Beth Rabban. He learned Greek as well as Syriac and traveled westward into the Roman Empire, visiting Constantinople and, according to later reports, other Greek-speaking regions. The sixth-century traveler Cosmas Indicopleustes refers to a learned East Syrian named Patrikios who is generally identified with Mar Aba. Returning to Mesopotamia, Aba taught, interpreted scripture, and wrote. Works attributed to him include biblical commentaries and material connected with liturgy and with controversy against Zoroastrian doctrine. His reputation for learning and for personal rigor made him a leading figure among the clergy of the Church of the East.

In 540 the church, still recovering from earlier contested elections to the catholicate, chose him as patriarch at Seleucia-Ctesiphon. He set out to reunite divided dioceses and to restore canonical discipline. In 544 he presided over a synod whose canons addressed simony, clerical marriage and household order, the rights of metropolitans, and the reconciliation of those who had adhered to rival claimants. He traveled extensively through the Sasanian provinces to install bishops, settle disputes, and bring remote communities into closer relation with the patriarchal see. These efforts strengthened the institutional structure of the Church of the East at a moment when it was the principal Christian body within the Iranian empire.

His success, and especially conversions from the Magian community, brought him into open conflict with the Zoroastrian priesthood. Under King Khosrow I Anushirvan he was arrested on charges that included his own apostasy from Zoroastrianism and the conversion of Magians. He was imprisoned and later held under guard, at times away from the capital, for a number of years. Contemporary and near-contemporary Syriac sources, including a Life of Mar Aba, describe him as continuing to ordain and to govern the church from confinement. He died in 552, still under the shadow of royal restriction. He was succeeded, after his designation, by Joseph.

Mar Aba is commemorated as a saint and confessor in the Church of the East and in the East Syriac tradition more broadly, including later Chaldean and Assyrian calendars. Historians regard his patriarchate as a high point of sixth-century East Syriac organization and scholarship. Because many details of his early life are known only from hagiographic narrative, a precise year of birth and some episodes of his imprisonment remain uncertain; the outline of his conversion, his synod of 544, his clash with the Magi, and his death in 552 is nevertheless firmly established in the chronicles of the Church of the East.