Aphrahat the Persian Sage

Aphrahat lived and wrote in the Persian Empire, outside Roman territory, in the first half of the fourth century. He wrote in Syriac. He seems never to have read a word of Greek theology, and he shows no awareness of the Council of Nicaea. He is the first Christian theologian of the Syriac-speaking East whose work we possess.

His book is a set of twenty-three treatises called the Demonstrations. The first ten he finished in 337. The next twelve he wrote in 344. The twenty-third came in 345. Each one begins with a successive letter of the Syriac alphabet, so the whole collection is an acrostic, a memory device, and a sign that he expected it to be learned rather than merely filed.

The timing matters. In 340 the Persian king Shapur II launched what Syriac Christians call the Great Persecution. Christians in Persia were suspect precisely because Rome had become Christian; to be baptized was to look like a partisan of the enemy. Bishops were executed, churches destroyed, a double tax imposed on believers. Aphrahat's later Demonstrations are written into that fire, and the twenty-first, on persecution, walks through the Scriptures gathering everyone who suffered before them, Joseph, Moses, David, the prophets, the Maccabees, Christ, the apostles, and tells his readers they are standing in a long line.

His theology is thoroughly biblical and thoroughly Semitic. He argues from the Old Testament constantly. He quotes the Gospels in Tatian's Diatessaron, the single woven gospel that Syriac churches used. He writes about faith as a building, about the heart as a temple, about fasting and prayer as things you do with your body. He never uses the philosophical vocabulary that Greek writers were fighting over.

He wrote for a distinctive kind of Christian: the bnay qyama, the sons and daughters of the covenant, men and women who took vows of celibacy at baptism and lived in the ordinary congregation rather than in a desert. That order existed in the Syriac church before Egyptian-style monasticism reached it, and Aphrahat is our best window into it.

Several of his Demonstrations argue against Jewish teaching, and they are unusual in the patristic record: he engages actual rabbinic arguments made by actual neighbors, in a region where synagogue and church lived side by side under a Zoroastrian king.

He was probably a bishop, perhaps of the monastery of Mar Mattai near Mosul. Beyond that his life is unrecorded. He was called simply the Persian Sage.

Sources: The Demonstrations of Aphrahat (selections in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 13); F. C. Burkitt, Early Eastern Christianity (1904); Jacob Neusner, Aphrahat and Judaism (1971).