Syriac Orthodox

Grew from

Oriental Orthodox

From

451 AD

Origin

Antioch and Mesopotamia

The Syriac-speaking church that likewise rejected Chalcedon, reorganised in the sixth century by Jacob Baradaeus, who travelled in disguise ordaining clergy for a hierarchy the empire was suppressing. Its heartland in what is now south-eastern Turkey was largely emptied by the massacres of 1915 and the community is now mostly in Syria, Lebanon and the diaspora.

What marks it out

Worship in Syriac, a dialect of the Aramaic Jesus spoke, using the Liturgy of Saint James. A literary tradition of the first rank — Ephrem the Syrian wrote theology as hymns, and Syriac scholars later carried Greek philosophy and medicine into Arabic, which is how much of it reached medieval Europe.

Alongside it

Also from Oriental Orthodox.

• Malankara / Saint Thomas Christians
• Armenian Apostolic (301 AD)
• Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo (330 AD)
• Coptic Orthodox (451 AD)

In the record

1. 451 AD Division

   Council of Chalcedon

   Defined Christ as one person in two natures. The Coptic, Syriac and Armenian churches rejected the formula, becoming the Oriental Orthodox.

This body appears in the history but does not carry recorded doctrinal positions here, so it is absent from the comparison panels.