Born at the Assyrian inhabited town of Amida (modern Diyarbakır in southeastern Turkey) about 507, he was there ordained as a deacon in 529 by John of Tella at Zuqnin Monastery,[1] When John was a teenager, he moved to Amida, located on the Tigris River.
In Constantinople he seems to have early won the notice of Justinian I, one of the main objects of whose policy was the consolidation of Eastern Christianity as a bulwark against the Zoroastrian power of Persia, through persecution of all the remaining pagans of the empire.
In any case, he enjoyed the emperor's favor until the death of the latter in 565 and (as he himself tells us) was entrusted with the administration of the entire revenues of the Miaphysite Church.
[4] He was sent by Justinian on a mission for the conversion of such pagans as remained in Asia Minor in 542, and informs us that the number of those whom he baptized amounted to 70,000.
Of the mission to the Nubians which he may have promoted, though he did not himself visit their country, an interesting account is given in the 4th book of the 3rd part of his History.
[4] He was ordained bishop of Ephesus (Asia) for the anti-Chalcedonians in 558 by Jacob Baradaeus, although his title was largely nominal and he remained in Constantinople.
He carried out this task faithfully, torturing all suspected of the "wicked heathenish error", as John himself calls it, and finding much worship of the ancestral gods amongst the Empire's aristocracy.
The latest events recorded are of the date 588, and the author cannot have lived much longer; but of the circumstances of his death nothing is known.
Of this second division of John's History, in which he may have incorporated the so-called Chronicle of Joshua the Stylite, considerable portions are found in the British Library manuscripts Add.
The third part of John's history, which is a detailed account of the ecclesiastical events which happened in 571-588, as well as of some earlier occurrences, survives in a fairly complete state in Add.
Its somewhat disordered state, the want of chronological arrangement, and the occasional repetition of accounts of the same events are due, as the author himself informs us (ii.
The writer claims to have treated his subject impartially, and though written from the narrow point of view of one to whom Miaphysite Orthodoxy was all-important, it is largely a faithful reproduction of events as they occurred.
1-288, and translated into Latin by van Douwen and Land (Amsterdam, 1889), and into English by Brooks (Patrologia Orientalis vols 17-19, 1923–26).
An estimate of John as an ecclesiastic and author was given by the Louis Duchesne in a memoir read before the five French Academies on October 25, 1892.
Everyone declared that the sun would never recover its full light again.Previously, these were explained as religiously symbolic or a local occurrence.
These were shown to be, in 2010, an actual report of two distant volcanic eruptions which resulted in a dimming of the sun for close to two years and created an artificial winter in the Northern Hemisphere that lasted for just over a decade.