Aba I

Aba I (or, with his Syriac honorific, Mar Aba I) or Mar Abba the Great was the Patriarch of the Church of the East at Seleucia-Ctesiphon from 540 to 552. Though his tenure as catholicos saw Christians in the region threatened during the Perso-Roman wars and attempts by both Sassanid Persian and Byzantine rulers to interfere with the governance of the church, his reign is reckoned a period of consolidation, In 544, the Synod of Mar Aba I adopted the ordinances of the Council of Chalcedon. He is thought to have written and translated a number of religious works. After his death in February 552, the faithful carried his casket from his simple home across the Tigris to the monastery of Mar Pithyon.

Aba is a highly regarded and significantly venerated saint in the Assyrian Church of the East, the Ancient Church of the East, and the Chaldean Catholic Church. He is documented in the Ausgewählte Akten Persischer Märtyrer, and The Lesser Eastern Churches, two biographies of Eastern saints. The first seminary of the Chaldean Catholic Church outside of Iraq was established in July 2008 in El Cajon, San Diego, as the Seminary of Mar Abba the Great.

Early life Born into a Zoroastrian family of Persian origin in Hala, Mesopotamia, Mar Aba was secretary to the governor of Beth Garmai province before he converted to Christianity. He was baptised in Ḥīrtā and studied at the School of Nisibis. He then went to Edessa in the Roman Empire, where he learned Greek from Thomas, who became his travelling companion. He traveled widely in the Roman Empire, visiting the Holy Land, Constantinople and Egypt. He was in Constantinople sometime between 525 and 533. In Alexandria, one of his pupils was the merchant and writer known as "Cosmas Indicopleustes". In his Christian Topography, written between 548 and 550, Cosmas credits Aba with teaching him everything he knows. He says that in Greek Aba went by the name Patrikios.

Upon returning to Persia, Aba became a mpaššqānā or teacher of biblical exegesis at the School of Nisibis. He later taught in Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the school of which he is said to have founded. The translator of Nestorius' Book of Heraclides dedicated his work to Aba. These survive today only in quotations in other works, notably those of Ishodad of Merv. A remark in the Chronicle of Seert may suggest that Aba made a translation of the Old Testament into Syriac, but there is no other evidence of this. In 544, he convened a synod to ratify these agreements; the synod agreed that the metropolitans of those regions under the See of Seleucia-Ctesiphon would, in the future, elect catholicoi at formal meetings. This agreement was, however, substantially subverted in later years, not least when the Persian ruler Khosrau I influenced the selection of Joseph, Aba's successor as catholicos. including a set of marriage rules prohibiting unions between close kin, apparently formulated in deliberate response to Zoroastrian practice.

In 549, Aba established a diocese for the Hephthalite Huns.

Tensions between the Empires Tensions between the Persian and Byzantine empires ran high during Mar Aba's lifetime, and, after the outbreak of the Lazic War in 541, persecution of Christians in Persia became more common. Zoroastrians hostile to Aba as an apostate pressured Khosrau to act against him, and, as punishment for proselytizing among the Zoroastrians, Aba was placed under house arrest and eventually exiled to Adurbadagan (Azerbaijan). He was allowed to return to the See after seven years and continued as Catholicos until 552, when he died – in some accounts, as a result of torture and exposure inflicted during his imprisonment.