PREFACE — CHAPTER I.

However, the passage of Athanasius will detain us, in his encyclical letter to the bishops of Egypt, written in the year 356, in which, opposing the Catholic doctors of his age to the Arians, he distinctly names Jacob with other bishops of Mesopotamia: 'Jacob and those with him from the midst of the rivers.' But since Jacob Aphrahat lived not in the region of Mesopotamia, but in Persia, or in the borderlands of the Persians and Romans, and also did not fight against the Arians (beyond the fact that Athanasius names some who are by no means counted among writers), it does not necessarily appear that Aphrahat is designated by Athanasius; rather it is Jacob of Nisibis, who is said to have attended the Council of Nicaea and to have been a most fierce defender of orthodox doctrine against Arius.

3. But let these things said about the homonyms of the Persian Sage suffice. Now we must deal with the place of origin and the time. The work itself reveals the author as being born from gentile parents and first instructed in the customs of the heathens. For, not otherwise than Saint Simeon Barsabae 2, praising God from whom he was led from the error of idols to the knowledge of divinity, so also Aphrahat himself reports his gentile origin; for he rejoices that he was turned away from the way of the nations (Demonstr. 11, 20); he also professes that he cast away the worship of idols, and now calls that a lie which he had received from his fathers (Demonstr. 16, 7); he adores Jesus who turned our stubborn minds from all the superstitions of vain error, and taught us to adore, worship, and serve God one, our Father and Maker (Demonstr. 17, 7); and finally, he admits the Jews are angry because, he says, we have become heirs in their stead (Demonstr. 16, 7).

As pertains to the place, George the bishop reports the opinion of some saying that the Persian Sage dwelt at Nisibis: ܕܢܨܝܒܝܢ ܗܘܐ ܚܟܝܡܐ ܦܪܣܝܐ original: "Where he lived, Nisibis, as some claim..." "Where he lived, Nisibis, as some claim, or in another place of those regions, he himself has not declared to us at all." But until the year 363, that famous city remained under the power of the Romans. It will be granted to one proving it that he perhaps traveled there; yet he could by no means have lived at Nisibis as his native seat; for first, we gather from certain places in the Demonstrations that he lived under the rule of the King of Persia, since he encourages the Christians vexed by Sapor through letters sent during the raging tyranny, namely in the fifth year after the beginning of the persecution (Demonstr. 23, 69); when he again dates some Demonstrations not only by the era of the Seleucids, or "of the Greek kingdom," but "by the years of the kingdom of Sapor" (Demonstr. xiv, 50 and xiiii, l. c.); or when in Demonstration V On Wars, with names concealed, he strives to show that Sapor would be overcome by the Romans.

1 Patr. Gr. t. XXV, c. 557.
2 In J. Overbeck, S. Ephraemi Syri, Rabulae episcopi Edesseni, Balaei aliorumque opera selecta, Oxford, 1865, p. 424, ll. 9-11.
3 In Lagarde, Analecta syriaca, p. 110, ll. 28, 29.