Background

Since the relations between Malankara and Antioch stabilised in the 1700s, it became common for many to view these relations as having been a part of the Church's history since its beginnings. The Pakalomattam narrative, embodied primarily within the influential Niranam Granthavari, reflects this anachronistic view, according to which the Archdeacons from the clan of Pakalomattam always oversaw Malankara under the spiritual authority of Antioch. Gradually, as a result of multiple factors including Palakkunnathu Mathews Mar Athanasius' invocation of an ad hoc primacy attributed to Antioch as an intrinsic and necessary one, the same outlook became the standard one.

By the 1900s, the newly formed pro-Patriarch faction held a belief which radically evolved out of this anachronistic worldview, in rebellion against the Malankara Metropolitan and the precepts of the previous Fathers of Malankara: the authority which the Patriarch of Antioch possesses over Malankara is not merely spiritual, but also absolute and unconditional, encompassing even temporal powers. This uncanonical axiom underlies the two agonising divisions — that from 1911 to 1958, and that from 1970 to the present period — and led to even worse and heterodox beliefs, including that St. Thomas lacked priesthood and proper apostolicity.

This page serves as a concise overview of major arguments raised by Syriac Orthodox sources contending for the historicity of Antioch's claim of jurisdiction over Malankara, as well as the relations which historically existed after 1665.

Defining the “East”

Pat. Yakub III asserts that “East” is a “term covering the countries east of the Roman (Byzantine) Empire” including Iraq, Arabia, and Persia, and that the See of Antioch held “jurisdiction over all the Christian East with its different ethnic peoples”, that is to say, “over all Asia” (History of the Syrian Church of India, pp. 11, 14). He attributes this principle to the sixth canon of the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the second canon of the Council of Constantinople in 381, and quotes an excerpt from Pat. Michael the Syrian in which he states — presumably based on the forged Arabic recension of the Nicene Canons — that “greater Asia”, which extends “to the utmost East”, are “under the jurisdiction of the See of Antioch” (ibid., p. 14). Since this misconception about what region constituted “East” for the canons can be found across multiple secondary sources, it would be well to look at the early canons and their patristic interpretations.

The sixth canon of Nicaea 325 defined that the Churches “in Antioch and other provinces” must retain their “prerogatives” (πρεσβείων) just as the ancient prerogatives in Egypt and Libya concerning the See of Alexandria should be retained. Expounding upon the same principle, the second canon of Constantinople 381 stated that “bishops are not to go beyond their dioceses”, and in particular instructed “the bishops of the East” (τοὺς [..] τῆς Ἀνατολῆς ἐπισκόπους) to administer to the communities of the East alone, while preserving the Nicene “prerogatives” (πρεσβείων) of the See of Antioch.

This particular provision for Antioch to possess seniority among the Sees of the “East” followed the administrative grouping of several civil provinces part of the Eastern Roman Empire excluding those of Egypt and Libya — including Isauria, Osroene (Edessa), Syria, and Mesopotamia — as the civil “Diocese of the East”, the capital of which was at Antioch. Thus all bishoprics in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire were placed under the primacy of the See of Antioch, for all civil provinces in the same were placed under the civil “Diocese of the East”. The “East”, in other words, is strictly “East” within the Empire for the canons, and does not include the “East” beyond it, including Persia and the Indian Subcontinent. This is confirmed by the same canon of Constantinople 381, at the end:

But the Churches of God in the barbarian nations [ἐν τοῖς βαρβαρικοῖς ἔθνεσι] must be governed [οἰκονομεῖσθαι] according to the custom [συνήθειαν] which has prevailed from the times of the Fathers.

In other words, the Ecumenical Council explicitly states that the ecclesial principles concerning the Christian Churches in the gentile nations, outside the Roman Empire, are distinct from what have been provided in the prior clauses, including those about the “East” and Antioch.

This is further confirmed by the Patriarchs of Antioch themselves. Pat. Alexander I of Antioch (d. 421) claimed jurisdiction over the Church of Cyprus by appealing to the canons of Nicaea 325 (as interpreted by Constantinople 381), for the civil province of Cyprus was under the civil Diocese of the East; this claim was later quashed by Ephesus 431, for it ruled that Cyprus was autocephalous since its beginning. Centuries later, the ninth-century Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, Pat. Dionysius of Tel Mahre (d. 845), writes that Pat. Peter III of Callinicum (d. 591) wrote an encyclical concerning christology and sent it to “all the monasteries of the monks and the churches of the faithful of the jurisdiction of the East, that is, in all Syria under his control” (Ecclesiastical History 2:222 / II:16-24). The claim that the “East” which Antioch has jurisdiction over includes the entire Orient including Persia and the Indian Subcontinent (effectively Asia), then, is an extremely late development unknown to the Fathers.

“India” and St. Severus of Antioch

A particular recension of the Vita of St. Philoxenus of Mabbug found in Ms. Harvard Syr. 38, a Syriac manuscript dating to 1448 CE, reports the following about the election of St. Severus of Antioch to the Patriarchate:

[Philoxenus] had caused the inhabitants of Antioch to follow the command of the faithful king Zeno [and caused them also] to choose Mar Severus to be Patriarch of Antioch and all Syria as far as / until India [ܐܦܛܪܝܪܟܐ ܐܢܛܝܘܟܝܐ ܘܠܟܠܗ ܣܘܪܝܐ ܥܕܡܐ ܠܗܢܕܘ].

While this note has not been discussed by any published work in my awareness, it has appeared in certain online circles to support Antioch's jurisdiction over India. This argument, however, loses its weight when one observes the clause-structure: “all Syria as far as / until [ܥܕܡܐ] India”. It appears that the medieval author of this work considered “India” to be bordering wider Syria, which is unsurprising given that Northeastern Arabia including Beth Qaṭraye was a known referent of “India” in several late antique and medieval Syriac texts.

Neilos Doxapatres

E. M. Philip cites Paulinus of St. Bartholomew's India Orientalis Christiana (1794) as observing that two early modern Catholic philologists, Leo Allatius and Théophraste Renaudot, mention “the Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch” to have “claimed jurisdiction over India”, and that “Nilas Doxopartrius affirmed in A.D. 1043 that the authority of Antioch extended over Asia, the East and the Indies” (p. 116). Following Philip, later Jacobite authors including Fr. Kurian Kaniamparambil (p. 30) and Sarah Knight (p. I:173) appealed to Paulinus for the same without verifying the information by consulting the sources.

To begin with, this citation is off. Paulinus cites Allatius and Renaudot as speaking not of “Jacobite” Patriarchs of Antioch claiming jurisdiction over India, but “ancient Patriarchs of Antioch”. More importantly, as a quick consultation of Allatius' De ecclesiae occidentalis atque orientalis perpetua consensione (1648) would confirm, Allatius explicitly reproduces Neilos Doxapatres' accounts concerning each of the Eastern Chalcedonian Patriarchates, and Renaudot quotes from Allatius. In other words, Doxapatres is the only relevant source with respect to this claim, and we may focus on him in particular.

Neilos Doxapatres was an eleventh-century Byzantine ecclesiastical historian who wrote his Treatise on the Five Patriarchs for King Roger II of Sicily, the commissioner of that work. It should be obvious that by referring to the Pentarchy, i.e. the five Chalcedonian Sees of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople, and Jerusalem, Doxapatres is describing the Chalcedonian Sees and their jurisdictions, and not Miaphysite ones so as to refer to the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, and this is confirmed by what he states concerning this “Antioch”:

Again, the [Patriarch] of Antioch held all of Asia and the East, and India itself [αὐτήν τε τὴν Ινδίαν], where even until now he sends an ordained Catholicos [καθολικὸν] titled the Romogyreos, and Persia itself, and even Babylon itself, now called Baghdad, for there too the [Patriarch] of Antioch used to send a Catholicose to Eirenopolis, called the [bishop] of Eirenopolis, and the Armenias, and Abasgia, and Iberia, and Media, and that of the Chaldeans, and Parthia, and the Elamites, and Mesopotamia.

• PG 123:1088

Doxapatres mentions two subordinate Catholicoi under the “Antioch” as of then: the ones of Romogyreos and Eirenopolis. These precisely were the two Catholicoi under the Melkite, i.e. Greek Chalcedonian, Patriarch of Antioch, while the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch had only a single Maphrian-Catholicos under him, in Tigris. Protospatharios Ibrahim ibn Yuhanna records in the Arabic Vita of the Melkite Patriarch Christophoros (ca. 960 CE) how the Greek Orthodox Christians of Baghdad were exiled to Persia, and that these emigrants came to be known as Ρωμογύρεως (Romogyreos), i.e. “the colony of the Romans”. This community had a Catholicos as their Primate. Εἰρηνουπόλεως (Eirenopolis), meaning “City of Peace”, refers to Baghdad, where another Melkite Catholicos resided. Thus the tenth-century Melkite Pat. Peter III of Antioch wrote in a letter to Pat. Dominic of Grado, that he sends “Catholicoi” (καθολικοί) and “archbishops” (ἀρχιεπίσκοποι) to “the great Babylon, and Romogyreos — that is, Khorasan — and the remaining provinces of the other [or whole] East” (PG 120:760C-761A).

In fact in 762 the Arab caliph al-Manṣūr (r. 754–75) transferred the entire community to the province of Chach in Transoxania together with their Catholicos, who was addressed thereafter as the ‘Catholicos of Romagyris’, but who by the end of the tenth century had changed his title to ‘Catholicos of Khorasan’. The Greek title ‘Romagyris’ (Ρωμογύρεως) may derive from the Middle Persian ‘Roumagird’ meaning ‘town or colony of Romans’ (Klein 1999). In medieval Baghdad there was a Christian quarter, known in Arabic as dār-ar- Rūm, ‘the house of the Romans’, where Melkite, Church of the East, and Syrian Orthodox communities resided. [..] The title is mentioned by the patriarch of Antioch, Peter III (r. 1028–51), in his correspondence along with that of Irenoupolis (Εἰρηνουπόλεως), the see of a second catholicos (Charon 2000: 265–66). This title is a Greek translation from the Arabic meaning ‘city of peace’, which was an epithet given to the city of Baghdad. [..] Later with the settlement of more Melkites in Baghdad a dispute arose between the two communities over who was entitled to claim the Catholicos. Those in Chach argued they had more right to him because he had gone with them to Central Asia, whereas those in Baghdad claimed him because formerly he resided at Seleucia-Ctesiphon which was in their district (Zayat 1952: 23–25). It seems it was as a result of this dispute that the Melkites eventually ended up with two Catholicoi.

• Ken Parry, "Byzantine-Rite Christians (Melkites) in Central Asia in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages" (Modern Greek Studies 12), pp. 97-8

Lastly, Doxapatres states that the Melkite See of Antioch sends a Catholicos titled Romogyreos to “India itself” [αὐτήν τε τὴν Ινδίαν ὅπου..], and as we have seen, Romogyreos was the Persian colony composed of Greek Chalcedonian emigrants. It therefore follows that Doxapatres' “India” is not the Subcontinent including Malankara, but Central Asia and Transoxania. Thus the claim that Doxapatres attested to the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch claiming jurisdiction over “India”, as in the Subcontinent, falls apart in light of examination.

St. Dionysius Bar Salibi

Further, how did you assert that all Christians believe in two natures except us and the Armenians, while the Egyptians, Nubians, Abyssinians, the majority of the Indians, and the country of Libya which in the time of Dioscorus was composed of one thousand and five hundred parishes, accept the faith of St. Cyril and St. Dioscorus, and of the great Severus? .. We Syrians, with the Armenians, the Egyptians, the Abyssinians, the Nubians, and the Indians, refer the Trisagion to the Son.

• St. Dionysius Bar Salibi, Treatise Against the Melkites

Besides the above, Bar Salibi refers to the Miaphysite Indians elsewhere (e.g. in his treatise Against the Chalcedonians). In particular, however, the excerpt from Against the Melkites is significant due to a couple of reasons. Firstly, Bar Salibi already refers to the Miaphysite Ethiopians distinctively, and Christianity among the Eastern and Southern Arabs had pretty much died out (except for minor pockets in Najran), and any communities that remained were Nestorian. We cannot, therefore, take “Indians” to be referring to either. Secondly, “the majority of the Indians” accurately reflects the likely religious context in Malankara where both Miaphysites and Nestorians dwelled, and Miaphysites may have been the majority during this period, as the Nestorian Metropolitanate for India had been suppressed sometime in the tenth or eleventh century.

Thirdly, Bar Salibi clearly distinguishes the Miaphysite Indians from the Syriac Orthodox. If the former were under the jurisdiction of Antioch, we would have expected some note about the same, or at the very least a hint, from Bar Salibi, who was the Metropolitan of Amid and the foremost Syriac Orthodox historian of his time. Unsurprisingly, then, Pat. Yakub III misrepresents his witness by claiming that Bar Salibi “testifies that the belief of the Syrian church of India was the same as our belief we the Syrians” (History of the Syrian Church of India, p. 18).

Post-1665 CE Relations

When Pat. Gregorius ‘Abd al-Jalil arrived in Malankara in 1665 following Mar Thoma I's request to Antioch (alongside Alexandria and Persia) for spiritual assistance, the Church entered a new era which both revitalised its Miaphysite heritage and initiated new relations with the See of Antioch. These relations, nevertheless, were quite sporadic and remained unformalised to a major degree until the 1800s.

While the Malankara Metropolitans welcomed and respected the spiritual assistance offered by the Antiochene prelates, including at the Synod of Chengannur in 1686 where the Church formally upheld Ephesian Miaphysitism and rejected the Latin doctrines, it was ensured that the foreign prelates would not interfere in the spiritual and temporal matters of the Church without its consent. For instance, the colophon of a manuscript in the Konat library, copied by a certain Geevarghese Kathanar, mentions that he was ordained as a priest by Pat. Gregorius with “the consent of Mar Thoma, the bishop of entire India” (quot. Pat. Yakub III, History of the Syrian Church of India, p. 54). Similarly, the agreement signed by Maph. Shukrallah before Mar Thoma IV confirms that “I will not ordain anyone in Malabar without your consent” as long as the latter walks in the way of the Spirit of God and the Patriarch of Antioch (cf. Seminary Case Diary, pp. 258-9).

This principle was maintained by the Malankara Church even when it moved to synodically recognise the primacy of the Patriarch of Antioch over Malankara in the 1800s. Mar Dionysius IV of Cheppad, who presided over Mavelikkara 1836 which spoke of Malankara being under the “governance” of Antioch, thus referred to Antioch as a 'foreign' See and stated unambiguously that "that foreigners have no authority over this Church". Later, Mulanthuruthy 1876, convened and presided over by Pat. Peter IV and Mar Dionysius V, would define that only those ecclesial decisions passed with the sanction and consent of the Synod / Managing Committee of Malankara would be deemed as valid:

It was resolved and the same was confirmed by the Yogam: that [..] therefore, in order that the said sahityam [lit. “state of union”; between Malankara and Antioch] may endure, (a) the foreign Edavakas and the Malankara Edavaka shall at all times be united in all matters; (b) the rights of both sides towards the See of Antioch shall be equal and the communion identical; (c) the Majlis [Committee] here and the Majlis there shall remain in mutual concord; (d) and all decisions made on behalf of our Church and community, with the sanction of the Committee, shall be valid.

• Ext. “G.G.”, Royal Court 1889 (English; trans., adapted); Z. M. Paret, Mulanthuruthy Sunnahadosinte Canonakal (1965)

A decade later, the Royal Court of Travancore would rule that the authority which the Patriarch of Antioch possessed over Malankara was strictly spiritual and contingent upon the recognition of his acts by the Malankara Church, stating that the latter “has been an independent Church” with respect to its temporal governance (Royal Court Judgement / Row & Iyer, p. 347). This verdict was viewed by Pat. Peter IV as an infringement upon his proper jurisdiction, and he attempted to depose Mar Dionysius V from the office of the Malankara Metropolitanate. This attempt was rejected by the Synod / Managing Committee of Malankara, including St. Gregorios of Parumala, which declared that all encyclicals from the See of Antioch concerning the administration of the Church “must first be presented before the Committee, and decided upon after discussion” (Malankara Edavaka Pathrika, Vruschikam 1892).

As Pat. Abded Aloho II revived the claims of absolute jurisdiction in 1909 contrary to the canons of Ephesus 431, a pro-Patriarch faction emerged within the Church supporting the same, and thus began a division which, though healed for a temporary period between 1958 and the late 1960s, continues to this day.