Yohannan VIII Hormizd
According to his autobiography, Yohannan Hormizd was born in 1760 in Alqosh to an Assyrian family. His father, the deacon Hanna (Yohannan), was the brother of the Mosul patriarch Eliya XII Denha (1722–78).
Yohannan VIII Hormizd
Yohannan Hormizd himself wrote a polemical autobiography in Syriac, a fragment of which (breaking off in 1795) was translated into English by the Anglican missionary George Percy Badger and reproduced in his classic 1852 study of the Church of the East, "The Nestorians and Their Rituals". His opponents responded with an equally intemperate history of the monastery of Rabban Hormizd under the headship of Gabriel Dambo of Mardin (1775–1832), which was published in a French translation by M. Brière in 1910 and 1911. Both texts provide spirited accounts of the intrigues that followed Yohannan's election as patriarch in 1780. Neither can be trusted on matters of interpretation, but if read judiciously they shed valuable light on the politics of the Chaldean Church in the late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth centuries and provide a wealth of factual detail omitted in many accounts of this period.