Julian of Persia

Venerable Julian of Persia (Julian Saba, the Old Man) was a hermit and abbot in Mesopotamia in the fourth century. Theodoret of Cyrrhus writes of him in the History of the Lovers of God. He is commemorated on 18 October and on 19 January, on the day of the synaxis of all the saints of Egypt, by the old calendar.

Life

Theodoret does not say where Julian was from or when he was born. He writes that in the depth of the Parthian desert he found a cave not made by hand and settled there, west of the Euphrates, in the region also called Osroene. The locals called him Saba, a Syriac word that in Greek means old man. He lived in fasting and prayer, ate once a week barley bread with bran, with salt, and drank spring water. He prayed with the psalms of David. Seeing his life, disciples began to come, who lived with him in the cave, and he was their spiritual guide, thus founding a school of asceticism. The number of disciples reached a hundred. One of them was the young man of noble birth Asterius, later famous, who founded his own school of asceticism near Gindarus, close to Antioch, and whose disciple was Acacius. With his disciples Julian went to Mount Sinai, where he built a church in memory of Moses's receiving the Tablets of the Law.

Our sources say that in 364, learning of the threats of Emperor Julian the Apostate to destroy Christians before the war with the Persians, he vowed to God ten days and nights of prayer. During the prayer he heard a voice telling him that the unclean and loathsome pig had perished. Even though the term of the vow had not passed, he stopped the prayer of intercession and passed to psalmody and a song of thanks. In the same year Valens, an Arian, became emperor and began persecution against the Orthodox, and Meletius of Antioch was driven out. The Arians spread in Antioch the rumour that the old man Julian too held their dogmas. The Orthodox feared that the rumour would draw the simple into the nets of the heretics. Flavian, Diodore of Tarsus and Venerable Aphraates asked Acacius to take with him Asterius, the teacher and disciple of Julian, and to call the old man. Acacius and Asterius persuaded him, and Julian, who had lived in seclusion for forty years, went with them to preach against Arianism.

After preaching with success and working many miracles, he returned to his cave. Among the miracles are healings and the death, by his prayer, in the city of Cyrrhus, of the heretical bishop Asterius, a sophist who deceived Christians with his eloquence. Theodoret knew Acacius of Beroea well and tells what he heard from him. He fell asleep in his cave, toward the end of the fourth century.