Modern assessments of his reign can be found in Jean-Maurice Fiey's Chrétiens syriaques sous les Abbassides and David Wilmshurst's The Martyred Church.
[1] The following account of ʿAbdishoʿ's patriarchate is given by Bar Hebraeus: Then a certain doctor, a secular priest, Pethion by name, went to the governor, and promised him 300,000 nummi of silver to be appointed catholicus.
Then the lawyers interceded between the bishops and the governor, and promised to hand over 130,000 zuze from the patriarchal cell provided that they were allowed to elect a leader of their own choice.
But the lawyers did not know that such a sum of money had come to light, but instead took the precious objects from the churches, and the gold and silver cups, and broke them and sold them so that they could offer the proceeds to the governor.
His interest in this mission was recorded by the tenth-century Nestorian writer Abu'lfaraj, who met a Nestorian monk in Baghdad in 987 who had recently returned from China: In the year 377 of the Arabs [AD 987], in the Christian quarter behind the church, I met a monk from Najran who seven years before had been sent by the catholicus to China with five other clergy to set in order the affairs of the Christian church.