Christopher of Antioch

From Baghdad to the court of Aleppo

He was born, probably in the first quarter of the tenth century, at Baghdad, into a Christian family of the Chalcedonian communion — the Melkite community of the caliphate — and was named ʿĪsā. He was trained as a secretary, the profession by which educated Christians rose in Muslim administration, and moved west into Syria, where he took service under the Hamdanids: first with an official of the state, and then in the entourage of Sayf al-Dawla, the formidable emir of Aleppo whose raids against the Byzantines and whose court of poets made him the most celebrated Muslim prince of his generation. The Antiochene territory, including the city itself, lay within his authority.

Where and when ʿĪsā became a monk the Life does not clearly say, and the change of name to Christopher belongs to his tonsure. What his years as a secretary gave him, and what shaped his whole patriarchate, was a working knowledge of Muslim government and the personal confidence of the emir.

Patriarch of Antioch under Muslim rule

He was elected to the see of Antioch about 960. It was not an easy inheritance. Antioch had been in Muslim hands for more than three centuries; the patriarchs were subjects of the emir of Aleppo, their flock paid the poll-tax, and the frontier war with the Byzantines made every Christian of the city a potential suspect. Within those limits Christopher's episcopate was vigorous and, by his biographer's account, remembered with affection: he restored and endowed churches and monasteries, promoted teaching and the copying of books — the Antiochian Church of this period was beginning the great work of translating the Greek fathers into Arabic — gave largely in alms, and used his access to the emir to obtain a remission of taxation for his people, which is the act the Life dwells on most. He seems to have functioned, as the great Melkite prelates of the caliphate often did, as the recognised intermediary between a Christian population and a Muslim state.

The rebellion of 965 and the murder

In 965 Antioch revolted against Sayf al-Dawla. Christopher did not join the rising. He withdrew from the city to a monastery and remained loyal to the emir, and when the revolt was put down his position with the court was stronger than ever — and his position among his own townsmen very much weaker. There were those in Antioch who never forgave him, and who had also come to resent the wealth and influence of the patriarchate.

Sayf al-Dawla died in February 967, and Christopher's protection died with him. Warnings reached him; he did not leave. On the night of 22–23 May 967, according to the Life, men from among his enemies in the city brought in soldiers — Khurāsānians of the garrison — who found him at supper and killed him there, cut off his head, and cast his body into the Orontes. The Christians of Antioch recovered the remains secretly and kept them hidden, since the murderers held the city.

Relics and veneration

Two years later, in 969, the Byzantine army took Antioch and the city returned to the Empire after three hundred and thirty years. The patriarch's relics were then brought out of concealment and buried with honour in the cathedral church of Cassian, and his memory was kept as that of a martyr. That memory is the reason his Life was written: the biographer's purpose is explicitly to establish that a patriarch murdered for his fidelity — not, formally, for confessing Christ before a tribunal — is nonetheless to be numbered with the martyrs, and the argument was evidently accepted at Antioch.

His cult remained a local Antiochian one and did not pass into the Byzantine synaxaria of Constantinople; with the gradual replacement of the old Antiochene usages by the Constantinopolitan books, and the upheavals of the Melkite Church in the early modern period, the observance faded, and he is absent from most printed calendars today. He is nonetheless one of the most securely documented saints of the Antiochian Church, and one of the very few for whom a near-contemporary biography survives.

The Life by Ibrahim ibn Yuhanna

The source for everything above is the Arabic Life of Christopher by Ibrāhīm ibn Yuḥannā al-Anṭākī, a Byzantine official of Antioch with the rank of protospatharios and a considerable translator of Greek theological works into Arabic. He states that he knew Christopher as a child. Internal references to the patriarchate of Nicholas II (1025–1030) place the composition in the late 1020s or after — some sixty years after the events, but from a writer with direct memory and access to those who had more. He composed it, he says, in both Greek and Arabic; only the Arabic version survives. It was edited and translated into French by Habib Zayat in 1952, and has since become one of the principal documents for the history of the Melkite Church under Muslim rule and for the Byzantine reconquest of northern Syria.