Bar Sawma was Patriarch of the Church of the East from 1134 to 1136.

Sources

Brief accounts of Bar Sawma's patriarchate are given in the Ecclesiastical Chronicle of the Jacobite writer Bar Hebraeus (fl. 1280) and in the ecclesiastical histories of the fourteenth-century Nestorian writers ʿAmr ibn Mattā and Ṣalībā ibn Yūḥannā.

Bar Sawma's patriarchate

The following account of Bar Sawma's patriarchate is given by Bar Hebraeus (who erroneously placed him after the patriarch Makkikha I instead of Eliya II):

Bar Sawma was consecrated catholicus of the Nestorians on Sunday, 4 ab [August] in the year 528 of the Arabs [AD 1134] in succession to Makkikha bar Shlemun. This Bar Sawma lived a life of bitterness, on account of the heavy burdens that were laid upon him, and was constantly praying for a quick and early death. His prayers were answered, for after fulfilling his office for only one year and five months, he died on the eleventh day of the former kanun [December] in the year 533 of the Arabs [AD 1136].^[1]