Now I find a thesis (pdf) which assigns a Gabriel of Kirkuk to Catholicos Sliba-Zeka AD 714-28. That comes from Thomas of Marga. So I'll need some posts for Thomas' mistakes. Which run so numerous and fundamental that I'm posting an index for those mistakes, here.
I've made a few offhand comments about Thomas of Marga's assignment of events. I disapproved his assignment of the Nestorian embassy to the Greeks: he says Shiroë, everyone else says Boran. I wondered if he'd confused this with the political armistice by the Persians. I was also skeptical that Qamisho' and 'Afnimaran were ever friends but since it looked similar for Isho'dnah, here I was willing to blame their mutual source. Thomas keeps shtum about Cyriacos the embezzler - perhaps a discreet shtum.
We may or may not count a muddle about a monastery of Rabban Salîba by Hegla-Omed somewhere by the Tigris. Some karens told Catholicos Hnanisho the Lame (r. AD 685-99), during his last years at the Mar Jonah monastery, that those monks had gone Messalian. Then Hnanisho wrote back THROUGH TIME to monks active a whole century earlier! - unless Budge's printer fouled up "690" for "590".
The real problems are when Thomas puts the wrong Gabriel at Mar Jacob's funeral. So I very much doubt that tall tale of Sahdona and Isho'yahb III.
Thomas of Marga was a wretched incompetent, to sum up. He and P. Scott-Moncrieff need to get together for drinks at whatever afterlife is reserved for lazy editors of Nestorian literature. I just hope they won't need to reserve me a table . . .
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