Copyright ©2011 by Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
Distributed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) License.
Also known as John of Beth Ruphina and John of Maiuma. An anti-Chalcedonian
presbyter, monk, and hagiographer of the 5th and 6th cent.; dates of birth
and death unknown. He was probably born in the province of Arabia, and seems
to have spent some time as a student of law at
From John Rufus three works have survived, originally composed in Greek but
preserved solely in Syriac: the ‘Life of Peter the Iberian’, the
‘Commemoration of the Death of Theodosius’, and the ‘Plerophories’. The most
important of these works is unquestionably the ‘Life of Peter the Iberian’,
to which we owe much of our knowledge about the first generation of
opposition to Chalcedon. The text has been anonymously preserved, but in
1912, Eduard Schwartz proved its proper attribution to John Rufus, mainly
through an evaluation of internal evidences. The narrative, rhetorically and
stylistically advanced, covers Peter the Iberian’s life from birth to death,
but draws particular focus on the travels throughout the eastern provinces
which Peter the Iberian undertook to provide spiritual support to those who
refused Chalcedonian communion. The much less extensive ‘Commemoration of
the Death of Theodosius’, written as an appendix to the ‘Life of Peter the
Iberian’, deals with the martyrdom of Theodosius, the Palestinian monk who
seized the Patriarchal throne in