Antioch's First Encounter with Latin Missionaries: The Response of Anastasius ibn Mujalla

 Antioch's First Encounter with Latin Missionaries: The Response of Anastasius ibn Mujalla

In the early 1580s, Jesuits initially sent to the Levant to reform the Maronite Church attempted to exploit divisions in the Patriarchate of Antioch to their own advantage. This resulted in a series of exchanges where Latin missionaries attempted to convince the Orthodox to accept the Council of Florence and the Gregorian calendar, while the Orthodox were forced, for the first time in a century and a half, to define their faith and identity in relation to Rome and the wider world.

 

After returning from a journey to Russia, the Patriarch Joachim Daw tasked his disciple, the Metropolitan of Tripoli Anastasius ibn Mujalla with writing a detailed response. While Ibn Mujalla’s response relies heavily on earlier Byzantine and Christian Arabic apologetic literature, he places his community, which he calls “the Melkite Rum,” within a globe-spanning communion made up of “Rum, Russians, Georgians, Wallachians, Serbs, Moldavians, Turks [i.e., the Turkish-speaking Orthodox of Anatolia], Arabs and others in various places,” who, “despite the remoteness of their countries from each other and the differences in their language” are united in dogma, ritual and practice. Moreover, Anastasius places great emphasis on Antioch’s Petrine and Apostolic foundation to demonstrate that Rome cannot claim apostolic or Petrine support for any innovations.

 

Read the entire text in my translation here.