Israel of Seleucia-Ctesiphon
Israel was Patriarch of the Church of the East in 961.
Sources
Brief accounts of Israel's short patriarchate are given in the Ecclesiastical Chronicle of the Jacobite writer Bar Hebraeus (floruit 1280) and in the ecclesiastical histories of the Nestorian writers Mari (twelfth-century), ʿAmr (fourteenth-century) and Sliba (fourteenth-century).
Israel's patriarchate
The following account of Israel's patriarchate is given by Bar Hebraeus:
Before this same year, namely the year 350 of the Arabs [AD 961/2], Israel, the successor of Emmanuel, was ordained catholicus, who had earlier been bishop of Kashkar. For after the death of Emmanuel several people favoured Gabriel, the metropolitan of Fars, but the bishops did not accept him, saying, 'He is the brother of a man who recently embraced Islam and denied his faith. It would bring great shame on us if we appointed as our chief the brother of such a man.' And so everybody gave their consent to this Israel, and consecrated him catholicus at Seleucia. He was venerable and chaste, but a doddering old man, and he died one hundred and six days after his consecration, at the age of ninety.[1]
Notes
- Bar Hebraeus, Ecclesiastical Chronicle (ed. Abeloos and Lamy), ii. 250
References
- 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)
