Eliya ibn ʿUbaid (Arabic: إيليا بن عبيد), also called Īlīyā al-Jawharī,[a] was a theologian, philosopher, canonist and chronographer of the Church of the East.
"[7] As archbishop, Eliya was the metropolitan over five dioceses: Aleppo, Jerusalem, Mabbugh, Mopsuestia, and Tarsus and Melitene.
[6][7] In the Concordance of Faith (Arabic Ijtimāʿ al-amāna), Eliya compares and contrasts the confessions of the Church of the East, the Jacobites and the Melkites.
Uri 38 (Huntington 240), copied in the 16th century in Arabic script in Egypt, and Vatican MS Vat.
A note in the Vatican manuscript records that "Eliya al-Jawharī, the metropolitan of Jerusalem, re-wrote or copied the treatise that follows".
The Bodleian manuscript ascribes the treatise not to Eliya but to ʿAlī ibn Dāwūd al-Arfādī.
The 13th-century scholar Al-Muʾtaman ibn al-ʿAssāl in the eighth chapter of his Summa of the Foundations of Religion and of the Traditions of Reliable Knowledge presents a synopsis of the Concordance.
[6] The Consolation of Sorrows survives in a manuscript copy dated by Giorgio Levi Della Vida to the 9th century.
[9] The Nomocanon Arabicus (or Collectio canonica) is the second oldest collection of canon law of the Church of the East after that of Gabriel of Basra composed shortly before in Syriac.
Since Eliya wrote in Arabic, while the official records of the church were kept in Syriac, there is some uncertainty regarding the identification of some dioceses.
[11] Eliya of Damascus is the first historian to record—and may himself have fabricated—the existence of five apocryphal early patriarchs with the dates of their pontificates: Abris (120–137), Abraham (159–171), Yaʿqob I (190), Aha d'Abuh (204–220) and Shahlufa (220–224).
The last two are in fact late third-century bishops of Erbil who were transferred forward in time and upward in office.
[18] Eliya also placed the historical patriarch Tomarsa in the middle of the third century, to fill a gap between Shahlufa and Papa, whose reign began around 280.