Demonstrations

Aphrahat · AD 337-345 · Mar Mattai (traditional) (Iraq) · letters

composition: secure

witness: the text's own internal dating notices for its two composition batches; the manuscript tradition begins several centuries later, and almost nothing independent is known of Aphrahat's biography

Twenty-three treatises addressed to a correspondent and composed in two dated batches, AD 337 and 344-345, by a Sasanian-Persian churchman writing in Syriac and known to later tradition as the Persian Sage, the Demonstrations argue points of Christian doctrine and practice, including a sustained defense against Jewish objections, from a milieu shaped by the Church of the East under Persian rule rather than by the Greek or Latin patristic mainstream, and their own internal dating notices make them an unusually securely dated fourth-century witness even though almost nothing certain is known about Aphrahat's life.