Three works have been ascribed to Eliya: the
Concordance of Faith, the
Consolation of Sorrows and the
Nomocanon Arabicus.
Theology In the
Concordance of Faith (Arabic
Ijtimāʿ al-amāna), Eliya compares and contrasts the confessions of the Church of the East, the
Jacobites and the
Melkites. It survives in two manuscripts:
Bodleian MS Ar. Uri 38 (Huntington 240), copied in the 16th century in
Arabic script in Egypt, and
Vatican MS Vat. ar. 657, copied in 1692 in
East Syriac Garshuni in Iraq. The authorship of this work is disputed. A note in the Vatican manuscript records that "Eliya al-Jawharī, the metropolitan of Jerusalem, re-wrote or copied the treatise that follows". The Bodleian manuscript ascribes the treatise not to Eliya but to ʿAlī ibn Dāwūd al-Arfādī. The 13th-century scholar
Al-Muʾtaman ibn al-ʿAssāl in the eighth chapter of his
Summa of the Foundations of Religion and of the Traditions of Reliable Knowledge presents a synopsis of the
Concordance. The authorship of the text was already uncertain by that time. He attributes it to "Eliya, the metropolitan of Jerusalem", but adds that "it is [also] said that this [treatise] is [by] ʿAlī ibn Dāwūd".
Gianfranco Fiaccadori points out that there were never metropolitans of Jerusalem in the Church of the East, only bishops.
Philosophy The
Consolation of Sorrows or
Casting Away of Sorrows (Arabic
Tasliyat al-aḥzān), attributed in the manuscript to "Eliya, the bishop of Jerusalem", was a popular philosophical text and survives in eight manuscripts. It is inspired by and quotes liberally from the
Art of Dispelling Sorrows of the Muslim philosopher
al-Kindī. The modern Egyptian philosopher
Abdel Rahman Badawi considered it to be "of little philosophical interest". It is written in the form of a letter to an anonymous Christian friend who had fallen into disgrace. Two individual Christians who fell into disgrace in Eliya's time are mentioned by name: Abū Ayyūb and Abū l-Qāsim. These are probably to be identified with
Abū Ayyūb Sulaymān ibn Wahb and his son
Abū l-Qāsim ʿUbayd Allāh ibn Sulaymān, both of whom served for periods in the
Abbasid vizierate and were arrested and imprisoned in 878 or 879. Since Eliya was not yet a bishop when he wrote and was living in the vicinity of Baghdad at the time, he must have been writing before 878–79. The
Consolation of Sorrows can be divided into two parts. The first is philosophical and rationalistic, including references to
Socrates,
Aristotle and
Alexander's letter to his mother. The second is exegetical. The stories of figures from the
Old Testament who overcame adversity are apparently written from memory. The
Consolation of Sorrows survives in a manuscript copy dated by
Giorgio Levi Della Vida to the 9th century. At some point after about 1570, the original manuscript lost its beginning and was bound with other pieces into a new codex. The Vatican catalogue attributes the
Consolation to Īlīyā al-Jawharī, perhaps based on the lost beginning. It has been published and translated into Italian.
Law and chronology The
Nomocanon Arabicus (or
Collectio canonica) is the second oldest collection of canon law of the Church of the East after that of
Gabriel of Basra composed shortly before in
Syriac. Although it is often dated to about 893 or about 900, it refers to two documents produced by Patriarch
John IV (900–905), one of which can be precisely dated to 11 January 903. This date is the
terminus post quem for the composition of the
Nomocanon. The
Nomocanon only survives in a thirteenth-century manuscript (MS Vat. ar. 157), where it is ascribed to "Metropolitan Eliya of Damascus". Eliya translated the texts he collected into Arabic. Besides the canons of the synods of the Church of the East from
Isaac (410) to
George I (676), he included some canons from the Roman church, to which he had easy access in Damascus:
Ancyra (314),
Neocaesarea (315),
Nicaea (325) and
Constantinople (381). He also included some pseudo-apostolic canons, such as the
Apostolic Canons and the
Teachings of the Apostles, and the false "canons of the 318 fathers" of the Nicaea. The
Nomocanon is chronologically ordered. Eliya compiled a list of the dioceses of the Church of the East. This list is of immense value to the historian, but it is not a complete list. It does not include the dioceses of the
province of China or the
province of India, perhaps because metropolitans were no longer being sent to them. The church in China had suffered severely in the
Great Anti-Buddhist Persecution of 845 and the
Guangzhou massacre of 878. Eliya's list includes a total of fifteen provinces, which he calls "
eparchies": the
province of the Patriarch, the six other provinces of the interior and the eight provinces of the exterior (seven in the east and one, Eliya's own, in the west). Since Eliya wrote in Arabic, while the official records of the church were kept in Syriac, there is some uncertainty regarding the identification of some dioceses. Eliya also included the oldest surviving list of
patriarchs of the Church of the East (at folio 82r). The list of
Eliya of Nisibis, however, survives in an older copy. Eliya of Damascus is the first historian to record—and may himself have fabricated—the existence of five apocryphal early patriarchs with the dates of their pontificates:
Abris (120–137),
Abraham (159–171),
Yaʿqob I (190),
Aha d'Abuh (204–220) and
Shahlufa (220–224). The last two are in fact late third-century bishops of
Erbil who were transferred forward in time and upward in office. All five became generally accepted in the historiography of the Church of the East. The first three acquired backstories that made them relatives of Jesus' earthly father,
Joseph. Eliya also placed the historical patriarch
Tomarsa in the middle of the third century, to fill a gap between Shahlufa and
Papa, whose reign began around 280. Unlike his other error, however, this one did not catch on. Eliya's
Nomocanon has been contrasted with that of
Ibn al-Ṭayyib of the 11th century. The latter was more thorough but he abbreviated and reformatted the canons, whereas Eliya left them much as he found them but skipped over many.
Ignazio Guidi called Ibn al-Ṭayyib's collection a compendium and Eliya's a sampling. ==Notes==