The Age of Monks and Empires · 451-636 · Syria, Mesopotamia
Syriac Orthodox (West Syriac) Christianity
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About This Movement
After Chalcedon, the Christians of Syria and Mesopotamia who refused the council's formula were in a harder position than their Egyptian counterparts: inside the Roman Empire, without a patriarchal throne of their own, and for long stretches under Justinian without legal standing at all. Their leader Severus of Antioch was driven from his see in 518 and wrote from exile in Egypt for twenty years. Their communities kept meeting, and their clergy kept being ordained, largely because of Jacob Baradaeus. A bishop consecrated under the protection of the Ghassanid Arab kings and of the empress Theodora, who spent decades travelling in disguise across Syria and Mesopotamia ordaining priests and bishops for a church the empire would not recognize. John of Ephesus, himself a Miaphysite bishop and one of Justinian's own missionaries, wrote down fifty-eight portraits of these people while it was happening. When the Byzantine defeat at Yarmouk in 636 ended the empire's power to enforce against them, what emerged was a separate hierarchy that had never stopped functioning.
Sources
- John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints (ed./trans. E. W. Brooks, Patrologia Orientalis 17-19, 1923-26) (primary) — 58 portraits of Miaphysite ascetics by an insider - extraordinary inside-voice material; Syriac with facing English translation, online (archive.org / tertullian.org).
- John of Ephesus, Ecclesiastical History, Part III (trans. R. Payne Smith, 1860) (primary) — Contemporary narrative of persecution and church-building under Justin II/Tiberius from the persecuted side; Syriac; the Victorian English translation is online; parts I-II survive only in excerpts.
- Pseudo-Zachariah Rhetor, Chronicle (trans. Greatrex, Phenix, Horn, TTH 55, 2011) (primary) — Sixth-century Syriac Miaphysite compilation covering 451 onward, including Chalcedon's aftermath; excellent modern annotated English translation (Translated Texts for Historians).
- Volker L. Menze, Justinian and the Making of the Syrian Orthodox Church (2008) (secondary) — The standard modern account of how a separated West Syriac church actually formed (518-553), ordinations, memory, liturgy; Oxford Early Christian Studies, in print.
- W. H. C. Frend, The Rise of the Monophysite Movement (1972) (secondary) — Broad narrative frame connecting the Syrian and Egyptian anti-Chalcedonian movements; dated but standard and available.
- Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 2, ch. 3, 'Greek Christianities' (F. W. Norris) (reference) — Reference anchor for the eastern-Roman provinces incl. Syria to c.600.