Before rising to the primacy of the see of Jerusalem, he was a monk and theologian who was the chief protagonist for orthodox teaching in the doctrinal controversy on the essential nature of Jesus and his volitional acts.

He traveled to Alexandria, Egypt, and to Constantinople in the year 633 to persuade the respective patriarchs to renounce Monoenergism, a heterodox teaching that espoused a single, divine energy in Christ to the exclusion of a human capacity for choice.

[8] Moreover, he composed a Florilegium ("Anthology") of some 600 texts from the Early Church Fathers in favour of the Christian tenet of Dyothelitism (positing both human and divine wills in Christ).

[10] According to the Passion of the 60 Martyrs of Gaza, Sophronius was executed by Amr ibn al-As for baptising Muslim converts in a period of heightened tensions when an earthquake destroyed an early mosque on the Temple Mount.

Themes of Anacreonticon 20 include the gates of Jerusalem (or Solyma), the Anastasis, the Rock of the Cross, the Constantinian Basilica, Mount Sion, the Praetorium, St. Mary at the Probatica, and Gethsemane.