He is Yeshu the scribe, born in Melitene (Malatya in Turkey), where he studied the philological, religious and philosophical sciences. He also became a monk in one of the monasteries and studied under the patriarch John VIII, and achieved fame for both piety and eloquence.

He was consecrated patriarch of Antioch after the installation of Athanasius at Amid in 1058 and assumed the name john. He is the ninth to assume this name after Athanasius V. He then relinquished his post and was reinstalled after the death of his opponent (Athanasius V) in 1063.

He administered the Church efficiently, ordained seventeen metropolitans and bishops. He died on November 6, 1073.

He was known Bar Shushan the scribe, who had a beautiful handwriting, copied many splendid books, and collected in one thick volume the mymre (Poems) of St. Ephraim and St. Isaac, but left it incomplete. He did an excellent job in dividing the mymre of St. Isaac into chapters, vocalizing them and commenting upon them. He also wrote a five page treatise, refuting the Malkite doctrine, which opens with the Creed of Faith; a lengthy polemical treatise on the bad customs which had crept into the Armenian congregation, contradictory to church customs, which he sent to the Armenian Catholicos; and a disputative argument with Gregory II the Armenian Catholicos (1065-1069), who was deposed and then reinstalled. Bar Shushan's other writings are a liturgy which begins with: "Fountain of love and goodness;" he is also said to have written another liturgy which we could not find, a short order of Baptism in ten pages used when death strikes a child suddenly; seven husoye for the Sunday preceding Christmas, for the evening and morning services of the commemoration of Mor Severus - his name is appended in the second husoyo - for the mornings of the first four Wednesdays of Lent, for the Fridays of the fourth and fifth weeks of Lent, mainly written for pestilences and the stoppage of rain and for the first time of prayer on Palm Sunday.

He also composed splendid poetry, of which four poems remain, written in the heptasyllabic and the pentasyllabic meters on the calamity of Melitene in 1058. We have it on the authority of the bishop Sergius of Hah (1483), that Bar Shushan wrote an excellent four page panegyric in praise of Jacob of Sarug, which begins with: Jesus, the light whose shining brought joy to all the earth. "He also wrote letters, in some of which He refuted his opponent, and many homilies and treatises, all of which are lost; twenty-four canons of which there survives only the one on the obligatory nocturnal prayer for priests and deacons. He also wrote in Arabic a Synodical letter to Christodolus the Coptic Patriarch, and also refuted those who criticized the Syrians for using salt, leavened bread and little oil in the bread made for Communion.