He was born in 1887 in the village of Qochanis in the Hakkari Province, Ottoman Empire (modern-day southeastern Turkey). His paternal uncle and immediate predecessor was Mar Shimun XVIII Rubil, patriarch from 1860 to 1903). His father was Eshai, a brother of Shimun XVIII Rubil, and his mother was Asyat, daughter of Kambar from Iyl. He had six siblings: Isaiah, Zaya, Paulos (who succeeded him as Patriarch), David, Hormizd, Surma.^[1] His brother Hormizd was later killed while studying in Istanbul during the Deportation of Armenian intellectuals on 24 April 1915.^{[citation needed]}

He was consecrated a Metropolitan on March 1, 1903, by his uncle, the Catholicos Patriarch, who died on March 16, 1903. He was eighteen years old when he succeeded to the position and occupied the patriarchal See of Seleucia-Ctesiphon at Qudshanis for 15 years.

In 3 March 1918, Mar Benyamin along with many of his 150 bodyguards were assassinated by Simko Shikak (Ismail Agha Shikak), a Kurdish agha, in the town of Kuhnashahir in Salmas (Persia) under a truce flag (see Assyrian genocide).^[2][3]

• "It is impossible for me and my people to surrender after seeing the atrocities done to my Assyrian people by your government; therefore my brother is one, my people are many, I would rather lose my brother but not my nation."^[4]

• List of Patriarchs of the Assyrian Church of the East
• Our Smallest Ally
• Assyrian volunteers

• Baum, Wilhelm; Winkler, Dietmar W. (2003). The Church of the East: A Concise History. London-New York: Routledge-Curzon. ISBN 9781134430192.
• Baumer, Christoph (2006). The Church of the East: An Illustrated History of Assyrian Christianity. London-New York: Tauris. ISBN 9781845111151.
• Coakley, James F. (1992). The Church of the East and the Church of England: A History of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Assyrian Mission. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ISBN 9780198267447.
• Coakley, James F. (1996). "The Church of the East since 1914". The Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. 78 (3): 179–198. doi:10.7227/BJRL.78.3.14.
• Wilmshurst, David (2000). The Ecclesiastical Organisation of the Church of the East, 1318–1913. Louvain: Peeters Publishers. ISBN 9789042908765.
• Wilmshurst, David (2011). The martyred Church: A History of the Church of the East. London: East & West Publishing Limited. ISBN 9781907318047.

• Official site of the Assyrian Church of the East
• The Invitation of the Patriarch Mar Binyamin at www.aina.org (First-hand account by Malik Daniel Bar Malik Ismail of Mar Benyamin's assassination)