Bar Sawma of Seleucia-Ctesiphon

Brief accounts of Bar Sawma's patriarchate are given in the Ecclesiastical Chronicle of the Jacobite writer Bar Hebraeus (floruit 1280) and in the ecclesiastical histories of the fourteenth-century Nestorian writers ʿAmr and Sliba.

The following account of Bar Sawma's patriarchate is given by Bar Hebraeus (who erroneously placed him after the patriarch Makkikha I instead of Eliya II):

Bar Sawma was consecrated catholicus of the Nestorians on Sunday, 4 ab [August] in the year 528 of the Arabs [AD 1134] in succession to Makkikha bar Shlemun. This Bar Sawma lived a life of bitterness, on account of the heavy burdens that were laid upon him, and was constantly praying for a quick and early death. His prayers were answered, for after fulfilling his office for only one year and five months, he died on the eleventh day of the former kanun [December] in the year 533 of the Arabs [AD 1136].[1]

• List of Patriarchs of the Church of the East

• Abbeloos, J. B., and Lamy, T. J., Bar Hebraeus, Chronicon Ecclesiasticum (3 vols, Paris, 1877)
• Assemani, J. A., De Catholicis seu Patriarchis Chaldaeorum et Nestorianorum (Rome, 1775)
• Brooks, E. W., Eliae Metropolitae Nisibeni Opus Chronologicum (Rome, 1910)
• Gismondi, H., Maris, Amri, et Salibae: De Patriarchis Nestorianorum Commentaria I: Amri et Salibae Textus (Rome, 1896)
• Gismondi, H., Maris, Amri, et Salibae: De Patriarchis Nestorianorum Commentaria II: Maris textus arabicus et versio Latina (Rome, 1899)