Tradition · 451

Syriac Orthodox

The Syriac-speaking church of Antioch, one of the Oriental Orthodox churches, led by the Patriarch of Antioch and All the East.

History

Roots

The church claims the apostolic see of Antioch, where the disciples were first called Christians (Acts 11:26), and the Aramaic-speaking Christianity of Edessa and upper Mesopotamia. Its Bible is the Peshitta, the Syriac translation in use by the fifth century (overview, secondary). Its greatest early poet, Ephrem the Syrian (d. 373), wrote before any of the Christological splits, and every Syriac church now claims him; a selection of his hymns is in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (CCEL, NPNF2-13).

What made it a separate church was the Council of Chalcedon (451). Chalcedon defined Christ as one person “in two natures.” Much of the Syrian and Egyptian church heard this as a step back from Cyril of Alexandria and the Council of Ephesus (431), and as a quiet win for Nestorius. For seventy years emperors tried to paper over the split, most famously with Zeno’s Henotikon (482), which affirmed Ephesus and avoided the Chalcedonian formula (overview, secondary).

Causes

Two men shaped the anti-Chalcedonian party in Syria. Philoxenus of Mabbug (d. 523), a Syriac writer and bishop, organised opposition and sponsored a new, more literal Syriac translation of the New Testament; his creeds against Nestorius survive in Budge’s edition of his Discourses (tertullian.org). Severus, a Greek-educated monk, was made Patriarch of Antioch in 512 under the sympathetic emperor Anastasius I. When Justin I came to the throne in 518 he was deposed and fled to Egypt, where he died in 538. His followers kept recognising him as the lawful patriarch for the rest of his life (overview, secondary). The church still counts him as its leading theologian.

Persecution under Justin and Justinian thinned the non-Chalcedonian clergy to the point where the movement could have died with its bishops. The answer was Jacob Baradaeus. At the urging of the empress Theodora and the Ghassanid Arab king al-Harith, the exiled Alexandrian patriarch Theodosius consecrated him bishop of Edessa in about 543. Jacob spent some thirty-five years travelling in disguise (burdeana, “the ragged one”) and ordaining bishops and priests across Syria, Anatolia, Mesopotamia and Egypt until his death in 578 (overview, secondary). The result was a full parallel hierarchy. Opponents called its members “Jacobites” after him; the church regards the name as a slur and calls itself Syriac Orthodox. Contemporary church histories from the anti-Chalcedonian side, such as the chronicle known as that of Zachariah of Mitylene, survive in English (tertullian.org).

Influence

After the Arab conquests of the seventh century, the church was cut off from Byzantine pressure and lived as a protected minority under Islamic rule. Its scholars translated Greek philosophy and science into Syriac and from there helped carry it into Arabic. Jacob of Edessa (d. 708) revised the Bible and the liturgy; Patriarch Michael the Syrian (d. 1199) wrote a world chronicle; and Gregory Bar Hebraeus (1226–1286), maphrian of the East, wrote on theology, law, philosophy and history in a range few medieval writers matched (overview, secondary). The Mongol and Timurid wars, and later Ottoman rule, reduced the church to a core in Tur Abdin and around Mardin, where the patriarchs lived at Deir al-Zafaran from 1293.

Three later events shaped the modern church. First, a section of the church entered communion with Rome, which produced a separate Syriac Catholic patriarchate from 1782 (overview, secondary). Second, from around 1665 many of the Saint Thomas Christians of Kerala, in rebellion against Portuguese Latinisation, accepted bishops from the Syriac patriarch; India is now where most of the church’s members live, roughly 1.2 million of about 1.5 million (secondary estimate, Wikipedia). Third, the church was a major victim of the Sayfo (“sword”), the massacres and deportations of Assyrian, Syriac and Chaldean Christians in the late Ottoman Empire in 1914–1924 (overview, secondary). After the patriarch was expelled from Turkey, the see moved to Homs and then, in 1959, to Damascus.

Key ideas and contributors

One incarnate nature. The church holds Miaphysitism: after the union, Christ is “one incarnate nature of God the Word,” Cyril’s formula, perfect in divinity and perfect in humanity, without mixture, confusion or separation. “The Word became flesh” (John 1:14) is read as one subject who is born, suffers and dies, so that the one who was crucified is God the Son. Severus developed this most fully. His letters argue that the properties of divinity and humanity remain distinct in the one Christ while denying that this requires speaking of two natures after the union (Brooks’s translation, Patrologia Orientalis 12).

Against Eutyches as well as Nestorius. The church condemns Eutyches, who was accused of saying Christ’s humanity was absorbed into his divinity. It rejects the label “Monophysite” for the same reason it rejects “Jacobite”: it believes the word implies that one nature swallowed the other. In its own reckoning it holds the faith of the first three councils, Nicaea, Constantinople and Ephesus, and nothing less.

Tradition, liturgy and Syriac. Authority rests in Scripture as read in Holy Tradition: the fathers, the three councils and the liturgy. The church uses the West Syriac rite and the Anaphora of Saint James, which it holds to be among the oldest eucharistic prayers (overview, secondary). Its hymnody, much of it by Ephrem and Jacob of Serugh (d. 521), carries its theology in poetry; a homily of Jacob on receiving the Eucharist shows the realist sacramental faith it shares with the Eastern churches (tertullian.org).

Order. The church has a historic episcopal order under the Patriarch of Antioch, with a Catholicos of India over the Indian branch. It is in full communion with the Coptic Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo and other Oriental Orthodox churches. The current patriarch, Ignatius Aphrem II, was elected in 2014 (overview, secondary; official site: syriacpatriarchate.org).

Key controversies

Chalcedon itself. For Chalcedonian churches, “in two natures” was the only way to protect Christ’s full humanity, and the anti-Chalcedonians were heretics. For the Syriac Orthodox, Chalcedon and Pope Leo’s Tome reopened the door to Nestorius by giving the natures a kind of independent action. Both sides accused the other of the heresy at the opposite pole. The church in Persia went the other way again and became the Church of the East, with its own Christology; Syriac Orthodox and Church of the East writers argued with each other for centuries in the same language.

Modern agreements on the Incarnation. In the twentieth century the old charge began to dissolve. In 1971 Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Ignatius Jacob III declared that “there is no difference in the faith they profess concerning the mystery of the Word of God made flesh” (Vatican). In 1984 Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Ignatius Zakka I Iwas went further, attributing the old schisms to “differences in terminology and culture” and allowing faithful of each church to receive penance, the Eucharist and anointing from the other’s priests when their own are unavailable (Vatican). The Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox joint commission reached a similar Christological agreement at Anba Bishoy (1989) and Chambésy (1990) (cited by title; link not verified). Neither dialogue has produced full communion. On the Roman Catholic side the obstacles are papal primacy and the later councils; on the Eastern Orthodox side, how to treat the councils after Chalcedon and the anathemas each side pronounced on the other’s saints, including Severus and Leo.

Internal disputes over Christology. The anti-Chalcedonians did not stay united. Severus fought Julian of Halicarnassus, who taught that Christ’s body was incorruptible from conception; Severus insisted it was truly passible and mortal until the resurrection. Later in the sixth century, tritheist teaching and a quarrel between the sees of Antioch and Alexandria divided the movement until Patriarch Athanasius I Gammolo and Pope Anastasius of Alexandria ended the schism in 616/617, though some sources say 610 (overview, secondary). These quarrels matter because they show the church defining its faith against docetism as firmly as against Nestorius.

The Malankara dispute. The Indian church has been split for more than a century between those loyal to the patriarch of Antioch and those who want an autocephalous catholicate. In 1912 a deposed former patriarch, Ignatius Abdul Masih II, consecrated a Catholicos in India, and the two factions went to law over churches and property. On 3 July 2017 the Supreme Court of India upheld the 1934 constitution of the Malankara Church and ruled for the autocephalous Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church (overview, secondary; that article carries neutrality warnings). The patriarchal side, the Jacobite Syrian Christian Church, rejects the outcome, and parish-by-parish takeovers have continued to cause conflict (overview, secondary). This is now the church’s largest internal problem.

Names and identity. “Jacobite” is disowned; “Syrian” was replaced in English by “Syriac” to avoid confusion with the modern state (the Holy Synod adopted the change in 2000; overview, secondary). In the diaspora, especially in Sweden and Germany, members argue over whether they are Arameans, Assyrians or simply Syriacs, a dispute that crosses church lines (overview, secondary).

Survival in the Middle East. War in Iraq and Syria has emptied many historic communities. In April 2013 the Syriac Orthodox archbishop of Aleppo, Mor Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim, was abducted with the Greek Orthodox archbishop Boulos Yazigi; neither has been seen since (joint statement on the fifth anniversary). Whether Tur Abdin, Mosul and the Nineveh Plain will keep living Syriac communities is an open question for the church.

What remains unresolved

The Christological case that split the church in 451 is now widely treated, by Catholics and many Eastern Orthodox, as a dispute over words more than over faith. What remains is everything the split built afterward: separate saints, separate anathemas, separate councils and separate hierarchies. The church’s practical future rests on two places far apart: a Middle Eastern homeland that is emptying and an Indian membership that is divided.