Ezekiel was patriarch of the Church of the East from 570 to 581. He is principally remembered in the popular tradition for having called his bishops 'the blind leading the blind', an act of presumption for which he was punished by becoming blind himself.
Ezekiel's patriarchate
Ezekiel's birthplace is not known, but like most of the sixth-century Nestorian patriarchs he was probably a native of northern Iraq. He was appointed bishop of Zabe (Arabic: al-Zawabi), a diocese in the ecclesiastical Province of the Patriarch, by the patriarch Joseph (552–67).
He became patriarch of the Church of the East in 570, shortly after the death of his deposed predecessor Joseph, and held the office for eleven years. Although there was some opposition to his election, he soon won over the doubters by his sensible policies. Instead of stirring up trouble by removing the men appointed by his predecessor, he confirmed all the priests and deacons ordained by Joseph. But he was too much of a realist to be entirely successful in his handling of his bishops, who had to deal with the effects of a terrible plague in Mesopotamia that had broken out towards the end of Joseph’s reign. The Persian authorities were unable to cope with the heavy loss of life, and bodies lay unburied in the streets. In Seleucia-Ctesiphon, according to the eighth-century historian Bar Sahde of Kirkuk, the detested patriarch Joseph had led a gang of gravediggers to clear away the corpses, setting an example of courage and sacrifice that had won grudging praise even from his detractors. As the plague continued to rage during the reign of Ezekiel, the metropolitans of Adiabene and Beth Garmai did what they could to keep up the spirits of their flock. They ordered services of penitence and intercession to be held in all the churches under their jurisdiction, as the Ninevites had supposedly done in the days of the prophet Jonah. The ‘Rogation of the Ninevites’, as this service was called, is still observed every year by the Church of the East. To Ezekiel, however, a service of penitence was an empty gesture, and he angrily observed that his bishops were no better than ‘the blind leading the blind’. Two years before his death Ezekiel himself went blind, a misfortune widely held to have been a divine judgement on him for his presumption.
At this period there was a considerable Nestorian Christian presence in east Arabia, a region known in Syriac as Beth Qatraye. According to the Chronicle of Seert, Ezekiel visited Bahrain and Yamama and brought back pearls for the Sasanian king Khosrau I. Khosrau's interest in the condition of the local pearl fisheries was doubtless an indication of their economic importance in the sixth century.