Michael the Syrian closes his chronicle with an appendix headed the names of the Nestorian catholicoi, and it numbers forty men. Its first is Acacius, who belongs about 485; the twenty-two this line carries before him, from Thomas and Addai down to Babowai, are simply not in it, and it stops at John V, three short of where this line reaches. That is less a gap in the record than a decision about where the record starts - Michael's opening entry is the man he says gathered the bishops of his party and defined two hypostases and two natures, so the list begins where, to a Syriac Orthodox patriarch, the other church begins. His narrative tells the earlier story anyway: Babowai's letter to Ephesus and his death at the king's order fill chapters of books VIII and XI. The forty entries are also not a second witness. Chabot showed the appendix was composed from Arabic documents, and he footnotes Gismondi's edition of the Book of the Tower throughout it - and that book carries the citation on sixty-four of this line's sixty-five men; where the two agree, nothing has been confirmed, and only where they disagree is there anything to weigh. Those disagreements are recorded on the tenures themselves and left standing. Even the numbering is unsteady - a title the copyist dropped puts the manuscript one behind the printed numbers from the sixteenth entry to the end.
Chronique de Michel le Syrien · t. III, pp. 520-524 (Appendice VI)