John of Ephesus

John was a bishop, historian, and writer. He provides one of the only first-hand accounts of the Plague of Justinian. He was also alive in what has been called the worst year in history, 536.

Born at the city 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, When John was a teenager, he moved to Amida, located on the Tigris River. Amida was in the province of Armenia IV. Ever since John was a small child, he lived in the monastery of Maro, the Stylite. After his death, John lived the monastic lifestyle. In 534, he left Armenia IV for Palestine because of imperial opposition to his miaphysitism. In 535 he passed to Constantinople. He returned to the east in later years of the 530s, where he witnessed the devastations of the great plague firsthand. He traveled the region, going so far as Egypt, in order to collect stories for his collection of saints' lives, which he compiled in a book (containing 58 such lives) around the year 565. He was back in Amida at the start of the furious persecution directed against the Monophysites by Ephrem, Melkite Patriarch of Antioch, and Abraham, bishop of Amida c. 520–541. Around 540 he returned to Constantinople and made it his residence. 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. John is said by Barhebraeus (Chron. eccl. i. 195) to have succeeded Anthimus as Miaphysite bishop of Constantinople, but this is probably a mistake. 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. 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. It was thought that John was trying to convert these people to Miaphysitism. He also built a large monastery at Tralles on the hills skirting the valley of the Meander, and more than one hundred other monasteries and churches, mostly on top of demolished pagan temples. 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. 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. In 546, he collaborated with the emperor during a persecution targeting pagans in Constantinople and its neighborhood. 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. But his fortunes changed soon after the accession of Justin II. About 571 John III the Scholasticus, the orthodox or Chalcedonian patriarch, began (with the sanction of the emperor) a rigorous persecution of the Miaphysite Church leaders, and John was among those who suffered most. John was imprisoned at Chalcedon. He gives us a detailed account of his sufferings in prison, confiscation of his property, etc., in the third part of his History. 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.

Writings by John of Ephesus describe the sun's light as going dim during the years 535 and 536 AD, which was subsequently followed by a cooling that lasted for just over a decade: There was a sign from the sun the like of which had never been seen or reported before. The sun became dark and its darkness lasted for eighteen months. Each day it shone for about four hours and still, this light was but a feeble shadow. 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. This is now known as LALIA, or the Late Antique Little Ice Age. A search for writings mentioning these dark years was undertaken when dendrochronologists around the world began to realize that the rings of ancient trees indicated that there was a miniature Ice Age lasting about two years that began at around this time. The hypothesis at that time was that it was possibly the result of a supervolcano that erupted in South America. A subsequent search puts forward that it may have been two different volcanoes that were some distance away from each other.

John of Ephesus is recorded as church historian, writer, presbyter and bishop.