Jacob Baradaeus and the Syriac Orthodox Church

Evagrius, a supporter of Chalcedon, says that in the first year of the emperor Justin, Severus of Antioch, the patriarch of Antioch, who daily anathematised the council, was ordered to be arrested and fled his see, and that his successor had orders to proclaim it (Evagrius, Ecclesiastical History 4.4). John of Ephesus says that Severus withdrew to Alexandria and the deserts of Egypt (John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints 48 (Patrologia Orientalis 18, p. 685)). Evagrius adds that a later constitution of Justinian anathematised Severus and laid the heaviest penalties on those who held his doctrines, so that the council was proclaimed in all the churches (Evagrius, Ecclesiastical History 4.11). He also says that the empress Theodora took the part of those who confessed one nature and cared for them (Evagrius, Ecclesiastical History 4.10). John of Ephesus, who belonged to that party and is the main witness for what follows, says that by the early 540s it was short of priests and above all of bishops (John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints 50 (Patrologia Orientalis 19, pp. 153–154)).

In the sixteenth year of Justinian, John writes, Harith bar Gabala, king of the Saracens, asked Theodora to have two or three bishops consecrated for Syria. At her order two men were chosen: Theodore for the camp of the Saracens and James, that is Jacob, for the city of Edessa (John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints 50 (Patrologia Orientalis 19, pp. 153–154)). Jacob came from Tella and the monastery of Fsiltha. He had gone up to Constantinople on business of the faith, had been given a house by the queen, and had lived there some fifteen years as a recluse, dressed in half of a coarse cloak cut in two. From that garment, his editor explains, came the nickname Burd’ana (Baradaeus), “the man of the patchwork garment” (John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints 49 (Patrologia Orientalis 18, pp. 690–692)).

John describes the years that followed in the language of a saint’s life. Jacob went on foot from the Persian frontier to Constantinople and Alexandria, finished his work in a place in a night and a day and was thirty or forty miles away the next night, while the bishops of the other side and the emperor, who paid men to catch him, hunted for him in vain. John claims that he ordained a hundred thousand clergy (John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints 49 (Patrologia Orientalis 18, pp. 692–697)). Because the canons require three bishops to make a bishop, Jacob took two monks to Alexandria and had them consecrated there. With them he ordained, by John’s count, twenty-seven bishops and two successive patriarchs of Antioch, Sergius and then Paul. One of the bishops was John himself, for Ephesus, and he says that many of the ordinations took place in his presence (John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints 50 (Patrologia Orientalis 19, pp. 154–158)).

His last years were troubled by a quarrel inside his own church, which John tells in his Ecclesiastical History. The patriarch Paul was declared deposed at Alexandria. Jacob, whom John calls a simple old man led by those around him, was persuaded to agree, and Syria and the neighbouring provinces divided into “Paulites” and “Jacobites” (John of Ephesus, Ecclesiastical History 3.4.14–20) (John of Ephesus, Ecclesiastical History 3.4.35). Jacob set out for Alexandria and died on the way, in the monastery of Cassian on the border of Egypt, within days of several of his companions (John of Ephesus, Ecclesiastical History 3.4.33–34). John rejects as a slander the rumour that Paul’s partisans had beaten him (John of Ephesus, Ecclesiastical History 3.4.33–34), and leaves open another, that he had first been shipwrecked (John of Ephesus, Ecclesiastical History 3.4.58).

By John’s account the bishops and patriarchs he ordained gave the opponents of Chalcedon a hierarchy of their own (John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints 50 (Patrologia Orientalis 19, pp. 154–158)). The heading of a later Life of him in one manuscript, which John’s editor prints as spurious, calls him bishop “of all the orthodox” and says that “on account of whom also we were termed Jacobites” (John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints notes in manuscripts of the later, spurious Life, quoted by Brooks (Patrologia Orientalis 19, pp. 228–229)). The Antiochian Syrian Orthodox Church (the Syriac Orthodox Church) is today one of the Oriental Orthodox churches (Catholic–Oriental Orthodox Commission, Report (2016)).