East Syrian Rite - History

History

The origin of the rite is unknown. The tradition — resting on the legend of Abgar and of his correspondence with Christ, which has been shown to be apocryphal — is to the effect that St. Thomas the Apostle, on his way to India, established Christianity in Mesopotamia, Assyria, and Persia, and left Addai (or Thaddeus), "one of the Seventy", and Mari in charge. To these the normal liturgy is attributed, but it is said to have been revised by the Patriarch Yeshuyab III in about 650. Some, however, consider this liturgy to be a development of the Antiochene.

After the First Council of Ephesus (431), the Church of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, which had hitherto been governed by a catholicos, refused to accept the condemnation of Nestorius. As part of the Nestorian Schism, the Church of Seleucia-Ctesiphon cut itself off from the Catholic Church. In 498 the Catholicos assumed the title of "Patriarch of the East", and for many centuries this most successful missionary church continued to spread throughout Persia, Tartary, Mongolia, China, and India, developing on lines of its own, very little influenced by the rest of Christendom. The Patriarch Ishoyahb III was credited with several improvements to the liturgy in the seventh century.

At the end of the fourteenth century the conquests of Tamerlane all but destroyed this flourishing Church at one blow, reduced it to a few small communities in Persia, Turkey in Asia, Cyprus, South India, and the Island of Socotra. The Cypriote Nestorians united themselves to Rome in 1445; in the sixteenth century there was a schism in the patriarchate between the rival lines of Mar Shimun and Mar Elia; the Christianity of Socotra, such as it was, died out about the seventeenth century. The Malabarese Church divided into Uniate Catholics and Schismatics in 1599; the former community deserted the pure East Syriac rite for a Latinized East Syriac version, while the latter deserted East Syrian Rite for Miaphysitism and adopting the West Syrian Rite about fifty years later. In 1681 the Chaldean Unia, which had been struggling into existence since 1552, was finally established, and in 1778 received a great accession of strength in the adhesion of the whole Mar Elia patriarchate, and all that was left of the original Nestorian Church consisted of the inhabitants of a district between the Lakes of Van and Urmi and Tigris, and outlying colony in Palestine. These have been further reduced by a great massacre by the Kurds in 1843, and the secession of a large number to the Russian Church within the last few years.

In the late nineteenth century there was an attempt to form an "Independent Catholic Chaldean Church", on the model of the "Old Catholics". This resulted in separating a few from the Eastern Rite Catholics.