St. Aphrahat

St. Aphrahat, called "the Persian Sage," was a Christian ascetic and teacher of the early fourth century who lived within the Persian Empire, most likely as the head of a monastery near Mosul, in a Church that lay beyond the borders of Rome and developed its own rich Syriac tradition largely apart from Greek and Latin influence. He is honored as the earliest of the Syriac Fathers whose works survive in full.

His writings, twenty-three treatises known as the Demonstrations, composed between about 337 and 345, form a precious witness to a Christianity untouched by the Greek philosophical categories of the West, expounding the faith, the Christian life, prayer, fasting, and charity in the vivid, scriptural, and Semitic idiom of the Syriac world, and drawing deeply on the Old and New Testaments. They also reflect the pressures of his time, including tension with the Jewish communities of Persia and the shadow of persecution under the Persian kings. Revered as a holy man, he is venerated as a saint.