The Founding of the Church of Antioch

During the rule of the Roman Empire, the city of Antioch was the capital of Syria and one of the empire's three capitals, alongside Rome and Alexandria. This standing gave it the pre-eminence to become the capital of Christianity in the Levant and Asia, so its bishop was the universal father, or the universal patriarch, of the East — that is, his spiritual authority extended over all Christians in that vast geographical region, whatever their nationalities, races, and languages. Christianity entered Antioch at the hands of the followers of Christ who arrived there after being scattered in every direction because of the persecution stirred up against them by the Jews around the year 34 AD. It was later visited by the Apostle Paul, who stayed there a full year preaching and proclaiming the new religion; then the Apostle Peter also came to it, where he is believed to have established his apostolic see in the year 37 AD. In this city the name "Christians" was applied to the followers of Christ for the first time. In the fifth century a schism occurred within the body of the Church, yet the leaders of the Syriac churches preserved the title of Patriarch of Antioch, in order to lend an appearance of legitimacy as successors to the Apostle Peter in leading the Church. Among them are the patriarchs of the Syriac Orthodox, and the official title of the patriarch in this church is Patriarch of Antioch and All the East for the Syriac Orthodox.

When Mesopotamia was divided into two parts, between the Persian and the Roman colonial powers, the Syriacs were subjected to political and intellectual pressures. After Christianity became the religion of the Roman state and the ideas of Nestorius concerning the Virgin Mary — that she was not the Mother of God — came to the surface, the Roman emperor expelled Nestorius and pursued and tortured his followers, until most of them were forced to flee to Persia, the state hostile to the Romans. This situation continued until the coming of Islam at the beginning of the seventh century AD, when they concluded peace agreements with the Rightly Guided Caliphs, and in particular with Umar ibn al-Khattab, and drew up covenants between themselves and the religious authorities of the Syriac Orthodox and Nestorian churches, by which the Muslim Arabs undertook to protect the Syriac Orthodox and Nestorian homelands, to permit them to exercise their religious and cultural rights and to build houses of worship, and to grant them their social freedom in return for the payment of a specified annual tribute (jizya).

During the Crusades tens of thousands of Syriacs were annihilated and Syriac villages were destroyed. The Syriacs also suffered great massacres from the beginning of Ottoman rule until the outbreak of the First World War, the most violent and cruel of which were the massacres of 1914–1919, during which more than 300,000 people were killed. Antioch was the seat of the Syriac see of Antioch until the year 518 AD, and because of the persecutions this church endured, the seat of its leadership was moved to the monasteries of upper Mesopotamia. It settled at the Monastery of Saffron (Deir al-Zaafaran) in the thirteenth century, near Mardin in the northeast of Syria, and remained there until the year 1933 AD, when it moved to the Syrian city of Homs, and finally its journey ended in Damascus, the Syrian capital, in the year 1959.

The Church Today

Throughout its long history this church suffered greatly for the sake of its faith, so much so that its former patriarch, Ignatius Jacob III, in one of his works considered its existence and survival to this day a miracle. During the First World War close to half a million Syriacs were killed and slaughtered, according to Syriac and Western sources, at the hands of the Ottoman Turks and the Kurdish militias in the region of Tur Abdin in southern Turkey. Those massacres coincided with the massacres of the Armenians, in which a million and a half Armenians were killed, likewise at the hands of the Turks and the Kurds. Historians have offered numerous opinions in determining the causes of those massacres, but the principal and declared reason was to do away with the non-Muslim infidels and to regard them, by virtue of their religious identity, as agents of the Western powers — even though the Syriacs lived the life of simple villagers, and no Western state was ever able to impose a protectorate over them, for they consider themselves a church that is administratively independent, subject to the authority of its legitimate patriarch of Antioch.

History records the honorable stance of the Arabs, who embraced the Christians fleeing the horror of their executioners and provided them with shelter and the necessary assistance until that ordeal came to an end. If this indicates anything, it indicates the Arabs' awareness of the falseness of the fabricated Turkish accusations directed against the Christians, for the aim of the Turks was to empty northern Syria of its original inhabitants in order to annex it definitively to Turkey — which they achieved following the Sykes–Picot Agreement and other partition agreements, whereby they succeeded in seizing the provinces of Mardin, Diyarbakir, Edessa (Urfa), and others.

Today the church has more than forty dioceses, and each of these dioceses is headed by a metropolitan who directs its spiritual and social affairs. In the past this church had hundreds of flourishing monasteries, of which only a small number remain today, the most famous being the Monastery of Mar Matta near Mosul in Iraq, the Monastery of Mar Gabriel in Tur Abdin in southern Turkey, the Monastery of Saffron (Deir al-Zaafaran) outside Mardin, also in Turkey, and finally the Monastery of Saint Mark in Jerusalem, in which the Lord Christ is believed to have held his Last Supper.

The church also has several theological institutes, the most important of which is the Saint Ephrem Theological Institute in Damascus — Maarat Saydnaya — inaugurated by Patriarch Mar Ignatius Zakka I Iwas in the year 1996 AD. These institutes supply the church with priests, monks, and nuns.

The Syriac Orthodox Church is a founding member of the Middle East Council of Churches, and it joined the World Council of Churches in the year 1960 AD and takes part continually in theological dialogues at every level. Its patriarchs in the twentieth century succeeded in laying the foundations of good and fraternal relations with the rest of the other Christian churches, both Eastern and Western. It also plays an important role in Christian–Muslim dialogue. Among the great fathers and saints of this church are Mar Ignatius of Antioch, Mar Ephrem the Syrian, Mar Gabriel, Mar Michael the Great, the learned scholar Bar Hebraeus, and others.

The number of members of the Syriac Orthodox Church today exceeds two million people, the majority of them in India and the rest spread across Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Jordan, the occupied Palestinian territories, Turkey, Egypt, Europe, North America, South and Central America, Australia, and New Zealand. The church at present comprises 24 dioceses, apart from its dioceses in India.