Churches in the East

I was looking through some old papers today and found this crib-sheet which I used to prepare for an exam on the Syrian churches of the East, while at seminary. We have a vague idea in the Latin church that there is another type of Christianity out in the East. Some of us know that there are Catholic Eastern-rite churches, such as the Ukrainian Catholic church and the Coptic Catholic church, but history has made things even more complicated. Apart from the group of Orthodox churches that are related either directly or indirectly to Greece and Constantinople, there is another loosely-associated group of churches called oriental churches. These oriental churches include the Egyptian Coptic church, and several Syrian churches, which use for a liturgical language something that is very like (although not precisely the same as) the language which Christ would have used commonly - Aramaic/Syriac. Classical Syriac developed during the heydays of the Macedonian Empire of Alexander the Great, and has influences of both Greek and Hebrew.

I don't imagine that it's easy to squint at the picture in this blog post, so I'm going to very quickly go through some of it. Like every other church, but more directly in this case, the Syriac church has Jewish origins, and had an immense reach, going past Mesopotamia and Persia down to the southern tip of India and further East to China. It had immediate Jewish origins. When you hear Saint Luke's account of Saint Paul's adventures among the churches of the Holy Land and Damascus, we're already hearing of the most ancient Syrian Christian societies. Antioch-in-Syria, the great capital of the Seleucian kings of the past, and a seat of the Roman governor in the time of Christ, was the place where the pagans first distinguished us from the Jewish communities, calling us 'Christians':

"For a whole year after this they were made welcome in the Church there, teaching a great multitude. And Antioch was the first place in which the disciples were called Christians." - Acts of the Apostles, 11: 26

Syriac-speaking Christians were also called 'Nazarenes.' This has persisted, for they are still today called Nazerani, as we learned when they were marked out for extermination a few years ago by Islamists. Christianity arrived in Edessa (upper Mesopotamia) very early, and advanced in the second century, when the Arab Abgarid dynasty ruled that city and its dependencies. Edessa was the cradle of Syriac literature, and became a centre for the Syriac church, alongside Adiabene and Nisibis. The Greek Old Testament, commonly called the Septuagint, was used in about AD 150 to produce the Peshitta, a Syriac translation of Scripture that remains a standard in churches like the Maronite, Chaldean and other Syriac churches, even those in south India. Most of the Syriac churches and other Eastern Oriental churches remained in communion with Rome until the ecumenical Council of Chalcedon in AD 451, when several of them separated away. Those who remained were called chalcedonian, and included the Melchite and the Greek Orthodox churches; those who separated became known as non-chalcedonian, and included the Syriac Orthodox and the Coptic churches. The separation was not merely theological, but political, especially after the Arab conquests and the invasions from the far East; the Byzantine Empire of the East was increasingly shored against the changing fortunes in the Holy Land, and lines of communication between Rome and Constantinople on the one hand and the Eastern centres of the Church began to close, to the point where European sailors in the fifteenth century found a Syriac church in south India that were in Catholic communion, but had heard little from Rome for centuries.

That course I attended at seminary pumped a lot of history into my head and its' practically all gone now. I remember being very sympathetic to the plight of these Syriac churches in the East, which have suffered very high levels of persecution for almost all of their existence. In fact, they are some of the most persecuted in the world today. To summarise the situation better than I ever could, here's a talk by Doctor Sebastian Brock at the Jesuit Heythrop College, which has always been friendly to the Eastern churches: