Shahdost (fl. first half of the 8th cent.) [Ch. of E.]
Bp. of Ṭirhan. According to the ‘Catalogue’ of ʿAbdishoʿ (chap. 111), Shahdost wrote a ‘synodical oration, some letters along with canons, and some short discourses and turgame’. What survives, however, are some quite extensive extracts from a work ‘On why we are separated from the Westerners’, preserved in a collection of E.-Syr. christological texts (where he is also called Eustathios). The theological polemic is primarily aimed against the Miaphysites and it contains what is probably a veiled criticism of the revision of the Peshitta NT commissioned by Philoxenos. The ‘Chronicle of Siirt’ (chap. 18; PO 4.3, 70) reports in passing that he attributed the Nativity ʿOnitha l-yaldā tmihā (Ḥudrā, ed. Darmo, I, 348 = Bedjan, Breviarium Chaldaicum, I, 321) to one of the 318 Fathers of Nicaea.
Sources
- L. Abramowski and A. E. Goodman, A Nestorian Collection of Christological Texts (1972), vol. I, 1–57 (Syr.), vol. II, xxvi–xxxii, 3–36 (ET).