Jacob Bar-Salibi

He was born Jacob at Melitene, in what is now eastern Turkey, and took the name Dionysius when he was made a bishop. Syriac writers usually call him Bar Salibi — son of Salibi. He belonged to the Syriac Orthodox Church, the communion that had rejected the Council of Chalcedon six centuries earlier, and he lived his whole life under Muslim rule in a region also full of Armenians, Greeks, and newly arrived Crusaders. He was a monk and a teacher before he was a bishop. In 1154 the patriarch Athanasius VIII made him bishop of Marash; he was later given Mabbug as well, and in 1166 he was translated to Amid — modern Diyarbakır — where he served as metropolitan until his death on 2 November 1171. He was a hard administrator with a temper, and his career included open quarrels with his patriarch and with neighbouring bishops. The Syriac chronicler Bar Hebraeus, writing a century later, called him the crown of his age and also recorded that he was not easy to get along with. What he produced is staggering in volume. Bar Hebraeus said that if all Syriac literature were lost, Bar Salibi's works alone could rebuild it. He wrote a commentary on the whole Bible, Old Testament and New — the fullest ever attempted in Syriac. He worked on two levels at once, giving first the historical and literal meaning and then the spiritual, and he drew on the Greek fathers, on Ephrem, and on the Syriac tradition behind him. His Gospel commentary preserves quotations from lost works, including material from Hippolytus of Rome on Revelation and from Ephrem's commentary on the Diatessaron, which makes him a witness to second- and fourth-century texts that no longer exist in their own right. He also wrote a treatise on the divine liturgy that is the standard explanation of the Syriac Orthodox rite; a Book of Theology; a set of polemical works against the Melkites, the Armenians, the Nestorians, the Jews, and the Muslims; canon law; a chronicle; and a poem on the fall of Edessa to Zengi in 1144, which he had lived through the aftermath of. His Bible commentary is still in use in the Syriac Orthodox Church today, eight and a half centuries after he wrote it. Sources: Bar Hebraeus, Chronicon Ecclesiasticum; Dionysius bar Salibi, Commentary on the Gospels and Exposition of the Liturgy (Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium); William Wright, A Short History of Syriac Literature; Sebastian Brock, A Brief Outline of Syriac Literature.