St. Aphraates

St. Aphraates lived during the early 4th century and was the first of the Syriac Church fathers. This means that he wrote, not in Greek like the New Testament authors and nearly all of the Church fathers before him, but in a dialect of the Aramaic language that was the native tongue of Jesus and the apostles. He was a celibate monk and attached great importance to prayer and self-denial. Ironically, at the time that the Roman emperor had finally legalized Christianity, St. Aphraates found himself within the boundaries of the Persian Empire which undertook in his lifetime a fierce persecution of Christians. The writings of St. Aphraates throw great light on the early Christian community in Persia, and he is often known as the “Persian Sage.” He died in AD 345, twenty years after the First Council of Nicaea. Biography by Dr. Italy