Egypt, never became a national cause of the whole country. East Syria had adopted the extreme opposite heresy — Nestorianism. All over Syria the Orthodox were always a large body. Nor was their faith a foreign Greek religion, as in Egypt. Great numbers of native Syrians were and remained Orthodox. The lines of Orthodox bishops and patriarchs were never interrupted. All Baradai's efforts only produced a new sect by the side of the Orthodox Church. At no time in their history were the Jacobites as numerous as the Orthodox in Syria.
As long as the empire held their country the Jacobites were persecuted; the continual efforts of the Government to bring Monophysites to communion with the Orthodox, either by force or by various compromises, naturally affected them too. Then came the Moslem Arabs. In 634 they defeated the Roman army at Yarmuḳ; they took Damascus, Antioch, Jerusalem, occupied the whole country, and from 661 to 750 made Damascus the centre of their vast dominion. From that time all Christian Churches were equally subject to Moslem rule. The Jacobites received the same terms as the Orthodox and Nestorians. They, too, became a "nation" of Christians; they suffered intermittent fierce persecution, as did the rival Churches. By virtue of the astonishing power of survival, common to all Christian bodies in the East, they lasted through the dark centuries which followed. They lost numbers of apostates to Islam, they had their own internal affairs, obscure quarrels among themselves. But one Jacobite Patriarch succeeded another; their lines of bishops, though gradually reduced in numbers, went on; they are still there, scattered about Syria, a small, poor sect,[1] which still loathes Chalcedon, glories in the memory of Severus and Baradai, and is in communion with the Copts.
There are several points to notice during this time. It is curious that the Jacobites did not attempt to keep up a Jacobite line of Patriarchs of Jerusalem. They had followers in Palestine, and once the Monophysites had intruded a man of their party there (Theodosius, p. 189). But they let that succession go.
- ↑ Already in the 13th century Barhebræus' brother (who continued his Chronicle) calls them "the small and weak people of the Jacobites" (ed. cit. ii. 474).
