A calendar quarrel that hardened into a church.
The body that broke from the Assyrian Church of the East after Patriarch Mar Shimun's reforms of 1964 — chiefly the move to the Gregorian calendar and the shortening of Lent — and consecrated its own patriarch in 1968. Same liturgy, same theology, older dates; talks about putting the two churches back together have been running, and stalling, since 2010.
Why it is filed this way
Living, and in reunification talks with the Assyrian Church of the East that have started and stopped repeatedly since 2010.
DeitiesOne God in three persons; the East Syriac christology of two natures and two qnome in one prosopon, identical to the Assyrian Church of the East's.
Founded1968 CE · Baghdad
FounderMar Thoma Darmo
AfterlifeResurrection and judgment.
TextsThe Peshitta · The Hudra · The Anaphora of Addai and Mari
The map
The Ancient Church of the East’s corner of it — solid lines are descent; dotted lines are resemblance only, ideas held in common across unrelated faiths. Click a node to recenter; ✕ returns here. All 171 faiths →
c. 1000 BCE Judaism 30 CE Christianity 431 CE The Church of the East 1968 CE The Ancient Church of the East
The old calendar is not a detail.
The church keeps the Julian reckoning for the fixed feasts, so its Nativity falls on 7 January by the civil calendar. The reforms of 1964 that moved the Assyrian church to the Gregorian calendar and shortened the fasts are, in this church's account, exactly the kind of decision a patriarch living abroad should not have taken alone.
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Nothing doctrinal divides us from the Assyrian church.
Both bodies confess the same christology, use the same Hudra and the same Anaphora of Addai and Mari, and ordain in the same East Syriac tradition. Reunification has been discussed formally since 2010; a joint declaration was reached in 2015, one patriarch abdicated in 2022 in the hope of speeding it, and the two churches are still separate.
held by most
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M
Mar Thoma Darmo.
Metropolitan of India for the Church of the East, he was deposed by Mar Shimun for opposing the reforms, travelled to Baghdad in 1968 at the invitation of the objecting clergy, and consecrated three bishops — restoring a hierarchy for the party that had none. He died in September 1969, little more than a year later. Everything this church has, it has through those consecrations.
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Christmas on the seventh.
The fixed feasts are kept thirteen days behind the civil calendar, so families keep the Nativity while their neighbours are back at work. In Iraq and in the diaspora this means the Ancient Church of the East celebrates alone, and in mixed families twice.
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