Matthew the Hermit

Matthew the Hermit, known in Syriac as Mor Mattai, was a Christian ascetic of the fourth century whose life is known almost entirely from Syriac Orthodox hagiographical tradition. He is the monastic founder associated with the Monastery of Mor Mattai on Mount Alfaf (Jebel Maqlub), northeast of Mosul in northern Iraq, one of the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monasteries. Tradition places his birth in the village of Šmūnīn in the district of Amid, the Roman city corresponding to present-day Diyarbakır in southeastern Turkey. During the persecution of Christians under the emperor Julian the Apostate in the early 360s, Matthew left his homeland with other monks and traveled eastward into the region of Nineveh.

On Mount Alfaf he lived as a hermit in a cave and gained a reputation for holiness and miraculous healings. The principal legend attached to his name concerns the conversion of Behnam and Sarah, children of a local ruler called Sennacherib. Behnam is said to have encountered the hermit while hunting; Matthew then healed Sarah of leprosy, and both siblings were baptized. Their father at first had them put to death, but later, according to the story, was himself healed, converted, and endowed a monastery on the mountain. The cycle mixes legendary and anachronistic elements—the royal name evokes the ancient Assyrian king rather than a fourth-century local dynast—yet it reflects the historical process by which a hermit’s dwelling became the nucleus of an organized community.

The Monastery of Mor Mattai grew into a major centre of the Syriac Orthodox Church. It housed an important library, served at times as a residence of the maphrian (the church’s eastern catholicos), and remained a landmark of Christian life on the Nineveh Plains through successive political changes. Matthew is held to have died in the later fourth century and to have been buried at the monastery that bears his name. He is commemorated on 18 September in the Syriac Orthodox liturgical calendar. Because he belongs to the age of the early mountain and desert fathers, he was never the subject of a later Latin process of beatification or canonization; his cult arose by liturgical and popular recognition within the Syriac churches.

Independent historical sources for his biography are scarce, and modern scholarship treats many details of the Behnam and Sarah legend as later elaboration. What can be affirmed with reasonable confidence is that a monastic founder named Matthew established an enduring community on Mount Alfaf in the fourth century, that the house became a principal Syriac Orthodox institution, and that veneration of Mor Mattai has continued without interruption in the Oriental Orthodox tradition.