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Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch

Eastern Orthodox patriarchate currently headquartered in Damascus, Syria

  • 21 min read
  • 5 chapters

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Its adherents, known as Antiochian Christians, are a Middle Eastern ethnoreligious Eastern Christian group residing in the Levant region, including the Hatay Province of Turkey. Many of their descendants now live in the global Eastern Christian diaspora. The number of Antiochian Orthodox Christians is estimated to be approximately 4.3 million.

Name and identity

"There is neither Jew nor Greek"

These ethno-cultural and social tensions were eventually surmounted by the emergence of a new, typically Antiochian Greek doctrine (doxa) spearheaded by Paul (himself a Hellenized Cilician Jew) and his followers be they 1. Established, autochthonous Hellenized Cilician-Western Syrian Jews (themselves descendants of Babylonian and 'Asian' Jewish migrants who had adopted early on various elements of Greek culture and civilization while retaining a generally conservative attachment to Jewish laws & traditions), 2. Heathen, 'Classical' Greeks, Greco-Macedonian and Greco-Syrian gentiles, and 3. the local, autochthonous descendants of Greek or Greco-Syrian converts to mainstream Judaism – known as "Proselytes" (Greek: προσήλυτος/proselytes or 'newcomers to Israel') and Greek-speaking Jews born of mixed marriages.

Paul's efforts were probably facilitated by the arrival of a fourth wave of Greek-speaking newcomers to Syria (especially in Cilicia, Galilee, Aleppo and Jerusalem): Cypriot and 'Cyrenian' (Libyan) Jewish migrants of non-Egyptian North African Jewish origin and gentile Roman settlers from Italy — many of whom already spoke fluent Koine Greek and/or sent their children to Greco-Syrian schools. Some scholars believe that, at the time, these Cypriot and Cyrenian North African Jewish migrants were generally less affluent than the autochthonous Cilician-Syrian Jews and practiced a more 'liberal' form of Judaism, more propitious for the formation of a new canon:

[North African] Cyrenian Jews were of sufficient importance in those days to have their name associated with a synagogue at Jerusalem (Acts 6:9). And when the persecution arose about Stephen [a Hellenized Syrian-Cilician Jew, and one of the first known converts to Christianity], some of these Jews of Cyrene who had been converted at Jerusalem, were scattered abroad and came with others to Antioch [...] and one of them, Lucius, became a prophet in the early church there [the Greek-speaking 'Orthodox' Church of Antioch].

These subtle, progressive socio-cultural shifts are somehow summarized succinctly in Chapter 3 of the Epistle to the Galatians:

There is neither Jew nor Greek: there is neither slave nor free: there is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28).

Dual self-designation: "Melkites" and "Eastern Romans"

The unique combination of ethnocultural traits inhered from the fusion of a Greek cultural base, Hellenistic Judaism and Roman civilization gave birth to the distinctly Antiochian "Eastern Mediterranean-Roman" Christian traditions of Cilicia (Southeastern Turkey) and Syria (incl. Lebanon):

The mixture of Roman, Greek, and Jewish elements admirably adapted Antioch for the great part it played in the early history of Christianity. The city was the cradle of the church.

Some of the typically Antiochian ancient liturgical traditions of the community rooted in Hellenistic Judaism and, more generally, Second Temple Greco-Jewish Septuagint culture, were expunged progressively in the late medieval and modern eras by both Phanariot European-Greek (Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople) and Vatican (Roman Catholic) theologians who sought to 'bring back' Levantine Greek Orthodox and Greek-Catholic communities into the European Christian fold.

But members of the community in Southern Turkey, Syria and Lebanon still call themselves Rūm (روم), which means Eastern Romans or Asian Greeks in Arabic. In that particular context, the term Rūm is used in preference to Yūnāniyyūn (يونانيون), which means European Greeks or Ionians in Biblical Hebrew (borrowed from Old Persian Yavan) and Classical Arabic. Members of the community also call themselves Melkites, which literally means monarchists or supporters of the emperor in Semitic languages – a reference to their past allegiance to Greco-Macedonian, Roman and Byzantine imperial rule. But, in the modern era, the term tends to be more commonly used by followers of the Greek Catholic Church of Antioch and Alexandria and Jerusalem.

Antiochian Greek Orthodox Christians and Arab nationalism

Following the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Russian Empire, the latter of which had long served as a protector of Greek Orthodox minorities in the Levant, and the subsequent rise of French colonialism, communism, Islamism, and Zionism, some members of the Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch embraced secularism and Arab nationalism as a means of modernizing the newly established states of Syria and Lebanon. They also viewed these ideologies as a potential alternative to political Islam, communism, and Zionism, which were often perceived as marginalizing Byzantine Christian minorities. Various (sometimes secular) intellectuals from an Antiochian Greek Orthodox background played an important role in the development of Ba'athism. Among the most prominent was Michel Aflaq, one of the movement's founders.

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