At the beginning of the re-establishment of the Word as Antiochian Archdiocese of North America's official magazine, Metropolitan Antony Bashir wrote a series of articles introducing readers to the various Christian communities of Syria and Lebanon. They are of great interest for understanding ecumenical attitudes within the Patriarchate of Antioch in the mid-20th century.
The following is taken from The Word / Al-Kalemat vol. 1, issue 2 (February 1957), pp. 31-34, accessed through the The Hoda Z. Nassour and Herbert R. Nassour Jr., MD, Archive of Lebanese Diaspora, here.
The Syrian Church... The Jacobites
by Metropolitan Antony Bashir
The modern world is sometimes startled to find the headlines devoted to a tiny and ancient religious body which uses the language of Jesus in its services, and has been divided from most of Christendom for centuries. In 1948 the Dead Sea Scrolls, including the oldest portions of the Hebrew Old Testament yet discovered, were purchased and brought to the United States by Mar Athanasius Jesus Samuel, Jacobite Metropolitan of Jerusalem, and in 1953 part of the Zone, or cincture, of the Blessed Virgin Mary was discovered in an ancient Syrian Jacobite church in Homs, Syria. Thus this almost forgotten Christian community drew the attention of the Twentieth Century world twice in a decade.
The communion known to historians as the "Jacobite" church is called in colloquial Arabic the "Syrian" church. The title is entirely appropriate, for the group was born of the intrigues of a Syrian Empress of Byzantium with a Christian Arab Sheikh, spread by the untiring zeal of a fanatical Syrian monk, and embraced by Syrians who opposed their ancient tongue and traditions to the Greek veneer of the official Orthodoxy of the Late Roman Empire.
At the Oecumenical Council of Chalcedon in 451 the Orthodox Church defined the important truth that Jesus Christ was both true God and true man: a perfect link between the Creator and fallen humanity. The Council acted against teachers who felt that in any union of God and man human nature would be absorbed. The heretics saw in a balanced Divine-human Christ a sort of blasphemous denial of the omnipotence of God. The Orthodox understood that Christ must represent both God and man if He were to be the Saviour of humanity. The heretics were called Monophysites (from the Greek, mone physis "one nature" i.e. the Divine) because they believed in the identity of the human nature and the Divine nature of our Lord.
Theological arguments concerning the exact relationship between the two natures in Christ are not popular today. It is doubtful if they ever were. The individuals who made up the masses that enthusiastically opposed the decrees of Chalcedon and proclaimed one nature in our Lord were not greater theologians than is the modern man on the street. The average citizen neither understood nor appreciated subtle discussions about the nature of Jesus, although many simple believers might be suspicious of any opinion that seemed to make the Saviour less divine. Nevertheless whole provinces of the Byzantine empire fell from Orthodoxy, and to this day the Christians of Armenia, Egypt and parts of Syria, as well as Ethiopia, are "Monophysite." The explanation is perhaps as much found in politics as theology.
When the decrees of Chalcedon were endorsed by the imperial Greek authorities many in the outlying districts of the empire found a religious excuse for their opposition to the government. The Armenians were never happy subjects of Byzantium, and the Egyptians, with their own language and distinctive traditions in faith and life, were able to replace all of the Orthodox bishops with Monophysites.
The new ideas were carried from Egypt into Syria and found ready acceptance with Syrian patriots who welcomed any theories unpopular at the capital. The Emperor Justinian I (527-565) determined to make an end of the heresy, expelled all Monophysite bishops and demanded a formal profession of Orthodoxy from all church officials. His wife, Theodora, of Syrian blood, took a different view, probably out of sympathy for her people, and to the ingenuity of this ostensibly Orthodox Empress can be attributed the existence of the Syrian Jacobite communion.
Justinian's repressive measures would have deprived the Monophysites of clergy, as those already ordained died, and no new candidates could be consecrated or ordained. With no bishops or priests to lead it the heretical party would disappear. Before this happened, however, the Empress took secret measures of her own. Among her proteges in Constantinople was a Syrian monk of humble and holy life, Jacob, to be surnamed "Bardai." Attracted by his reputation as a miracle-worker, Theodora brought him to the capital, but he shunned the court and spent his days in the strictest retirement in a suburban monastery.
When the effects of Justianian's regulations began to be felt in Syria a certain Harith ibn-Jaballah, Sheikh of the Christian Ghassanid Arabs, appealed to the Syrian patriotism of the Empress. Theodora responded at once. The Monophysite Patriarch of Alexandria was in prison in Constantinople, and the Empress arranged to have him consecrate Jacob Bardai to the episcopate in 543.
His new commission transformed Jacob from a retiring contemplative into an active missionary. He left is monastic retreat and spent the remaining fort-odd years of his life feverishly travelling through Syria and the Empire planting the seeds of the new faith. In disguise, and avoiding the imperial police and the Orthodox bishops, he encouraged the persecuted sectarians to remain faithful, and founded new communities. Jacob centered his activity in Syria, and Monophysitism grew as a Syrian protest against the Empire. By the time of his death in 578 Jacob Bardai is alleged to have ordained thousands of priests and almost one hundred bishops, including one who assumed the title, "Patriarch of Antioch," and whose successors head the communion today.
Even during the life of the energetic Jacob the new organization was plagued by internal dissentions. After the first burst of missionary activity which brought so many Syrian Christians into the Jacobite fold a decline ensued, and the Monophysite community has never since been numerically strong in Syria. The Orthodox were still using the ancient Syriac rite, and to many of the faithful in the Levant the Empire was cosmopolitan rather than Greek. While the Byzantine Empire controlled the Middle East the Orthodox Church enjoyed government support and was never seriously threatened by the Jacobites.
In the middle seventh century the Moslem Arabs took Syria from Byzantium, and the Jacobites were granted civil recognition similar to that accorded the Orthodox. The Jacobites had served as a sort of fifth column for the advancing Arabs, and were rewarded and patronized by the new masters of the land. The great golden age of the Jacobite community lasted from shortly after the Arab conquest until the arrival of the Turks.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the Jacobites developed a tradition of scholarship inherited from Syrian Orthodoxy. At a time when learning revived in both east and west, the Jacobites produced remarkable scholars in theology, history and the sciences; men who were the peer of any Christian savant of the time.
Among many whose names stand out in the history of Christian learning, the most notable was Gregory Abdul-Faraj, known as Barhebraeus. Acquainted with Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Syriac, he left a history which is the most important source of information for his period. He was a scientist, as well as a bishop and theologian, and wrote treatises on medicine, mathematics and astronomy. He died in 1286 and the movement has not since produced outstanding scholars in great numbers.
In the twelfth century the Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch presided over twenty Metropolitans, and some one hundred and twenty bishops in the Levant, but in the fourteenth century severe Moslem persecution began and the communion has lost ground ever since. During World War I thousands of Jacobites were slaughtered by the Turks, and there are only 80,000 or 90,000 left today.
Relations with Orthodoxy
The Jacobites are socially and culturally related to the Greek Orthodox of Syria and Lebanon, where some 10,000 of them still live. The Patriarch lives in Homs, and governs the communion with the assistance of a Holy Synod of Metropolitans. The bulk of the faithful live in Irak, and there are five parishes in the United States. Relations with the Orthodox Church are cordial, and in some places, notably Malabar in India, periodical meetings are held to discuss reunion. One of our illustrations shows a recent meeting between our Patriarch and the Jacobite leader. In Jerusalem the two communities share the privileges of several shrines, and a Monophysite hierarch is associated with the Orthodox Patriarch in the Holy Fire ceremony of Easter Eve at the Holy Sepulchre.
There is, of course, no question of reunion or intercommunion until the Jacobites indicate their profession of full Orthodox faith by acceptance of all of the Oecumenical Councils, and purify their rites of certain expressions indicative of classical Monophysitism.
The Jacobite World
As the Syrian Orthodox are part of the world-wide Orthodox Catholic Church, so the Jacobites are but one section of a larger unity. There are some 8,000,000 Monophysites in the world, the largest bodies being the Armenian national church, and the Coptic communion in Egypt, while the Syrian Jacobites, the Ethiopians and the church in Malabar, India, are smaller branches of the same fellowship. In theory all of these bodies reject all of the Oecumenical Councils except the first three, and are officially committed to the denial of two natures in Christ. In all other matters their belief is generally that of the Orthodox Church. In the event of reunion they would not be expected to substitute the Byzantine rite for the ancient forms which were used by their ancestors before the schism.
Liturgy and Customs
The Jacobites use a Liturgy much like that originally employed by all the Christians in Syria, and later replaced by the Greek rite for the Orthodox. The liturgical language is a form of Aramaic, commonly believed to be the tongue spoken by Jesus Christ, and some communities of Jacobites still speak it. Most of those in Syria have Arabic as the vernacular, but all retain Aramaic in the church service. The Liturgy and rites for the sacraments have the general flavor of those used by the Orthodox, but there are many major and minor differences, a few of them related to the distinctive beliefs of the Monophysites. The sign of the cross is made from left to right, as in the west. Jacobites commonly ordain many minor clergy, i.e., deacons, subdeacons, readers, etc., who have secular employment, but assist at Sunday and other services.
The Name
The name Monophysite refers to the special emphasis on our Lord's nature, and is used in technical studies of the movement. In the Arabic vernacular the Monophysite communion is referred to as the "Syrian" Church, a very apt title as we have seen. They call themselves "Syrian Orthodox," since they regard themselves as orthodox and the Orthodox as "diophysite" ("two-nature") heretics. The name Jacobite, commonly used in western histories, is derived from their famous apostle, Jacob Bardai. "Bardai" is a nickname referring to the disreputable clothing Jacob is supposed to have worn to avoid detection by the police. Some Jacobites in the United States call themselves Assyrians. This name does not make identification any simpler, since Anglican missionaries called the Nestorians "Assyrians" in the last century, and they too have since used it.
The Future
The animosity which accompanied the origin of the Jacobites has long since worn away; a faith which is identical in all but 3% of doctrine binds Jacobite and Orthodox in a common heritage. Both have suffered and died for this faith at the hands of common enemies; both have shed their blood for their one Lord. The path to reunion would imply sacrifices on both sides: the Orthodox would be required to admit to equal use the ancient Syrian rite once abandoned for the rite of Byzantium, and the Jacobites to acknowledge the tradition of the seven Councils. No where in the ecclesiastical world are Orthodox and Monophysites closer together, geographically and in cultural heritage, than in Syria, and it should be the special function of Syrian Orthodox and Syrian Jacobites to heal this ancient rift. Old prejudices die slowly, but with knowledge comes understanding, and with understanding love, and in love those of the most divergent of opinions may meet in Him who is supreme love.
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