Yohannan V was Patriarch of the Church of the East from 1000 to 1011.
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Brief accounts of Yohannan's patriarchate are given in the Ecclesiastical Chronicle of the Jacobite writer Bar Hebraeus (floruit 1280) and in the ecclesiastical histories of the Nestorian writers Mari (twelfth-century), ʿAmr (fourteenth-century) and Sliba (fourteenth-century)
The following account of Yohannan's election is given by Bar Hebraeus:
After the catholicus Mari had fulfilled his office for fourteen years, he died in the first month of the year 390 of the Arabs, that is to say on the twenty-eighth day of the former kanun [December] in the year 1311 of the Greeks [AD 999]. He was succeeded by Yunanis II, the metropolitan of Fars. This man, when he heard of the death of Mari, went to Shiraz, to the governor Baha al-Dawla, and won his support. Baha al-Dawla thereupon ordered that he should become catholicus. When the nobles of Baghdad heard that he had assumed the leadership uncanonically, by going to the governor's palace without being either elected or acclaimed, they were deeply offended, but were unable to oppose the edict. And so he was consecrated catholicus against the wishes of his people.[1]
(Bar Hebraeus called Yohannan V and his predecessor Yohannan IV (900–05) Yunanis, an alternative name for Yohannan more frequently used in the Syrian Orthodox Church than in the Church of the East. For Bar Hebraeus, therefore, he is the patriarch 'Yunanis II'. The Nestorian sources correctly style him Yohannan V.)
| Preceded by Mari (987–999) |
Catholicus-Patriarch of the East (1000–1011) |
Succeeded by Yohannan VI (1012–1016) |