The Malankara half that kept Antioch.
The Indian archdiocese of the Syriac Orthodox Church: the party of Kerala's Saint Thomas Christians that stayed under the Patriarch of Antioch when the Catholicate faction went its own way. It has had its own catholicos in India since 2002, and it has spent a century in court against the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church over who owns the parishes.
DeitiesOne God in three persons; one incarnate nature of the Word, in the West Syriac tradition.
Founded1912 CE · Kerala
AfterlifeResurrection and judgment; the dead are prayed for, and where the courts have closed a cemetery to one side, that has become the sharpest grievance of all.
TextsThe Peshitta and the Malayalam Bible · The Qurbana of Saint James · The Shhimo
The map
The Jacobite Syrian Christian Church’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 451 CE Oriental Orthodoxy 451 CE The Syriac Orthodox Church 1912 CE The Jacobite Syrian Christian Church
The Patriarch of Antioch is the head of the church in India.
The Jacobite Syrian Christian Church is the Indian archdiocese of the Syriac Orthodox Church, in communion with and under the Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, with a Catholicos in India since 2002 acting under him. Everything else — the Qurbana of Saint James, the fifty-day Lent, the Saint Thomas tradition — it holds in common with the church it is at law with.
Go deeper — context →
The 1934 constitution does not bind our parishes.
The church holds that the constitution adopted by the Malankara Association in 1934 cannot govern parishes that never accepted it, and that the patriarch's authority in India was never surrendered. Indian courts, up to and including the Supreme Court in 1958, 1995, 2017, 2018 and 2019, have consistently held the opposite. The church has continued to contest it.
⚖ contested within
Go deeper — context →
M
Mor Ignatius Elias III.
The Patriarch of Antioch came to Kerala in 1931 to reconcile the two Malankara factions, worked at it for a year, and died at Manjinikkara in February 1932 without succeeding. He was buried there. The tomb became a pilgrimage site and the annual feast is now one of the largest Christian gatherings in south India.
Meet them — context →
The Manjinikkara pilgrimage.
Every February pilgrims converge on the hill at Manjinikkara, many of them walking the last part barefoot, for days of Qurbana at the patriarch's tomb. People of other churches and other religions come. It is the single largest event in the Jacobite year and it commemorates a failed peace mission.
Go deeper — context →