THE P
RTAL
Where did the Apostles go ?
March 2017 Page 6
Fr Mark Woodruff traces their post-Biblical lives
In January , we saw the Church spreading from the Holy Land and embedding in the great cities of the eastern Roman Empire . St Mark took the witness of Peter south to Greek-speaking Jews in Alexandria and Egypt , while Philip and James are honoured for evangelising older Hebraic settlements up the Nile . From these missions arose the Church among the Copts , in Ethiopia and Eritrea to this day .
Peter , Paul , Andrew , Bartholomew , Thomas and Thaddaeus found that Antioch , at the north-east of the Mediterranean , became their evangelistic springboard north , west and east . We tend to think of people and languages in separated nation states , but Antioch and Alexandria were cosmopolitan centres , relying on people from near and far to overlap , co-exist , trade , and communicate all the time . The gift of tongues described in Acts 2 is not exotic : it describes the Church in its setting amid the diverse peoples belonging to it .
Picture Bartholomew going north to the Armenians , extending from the Mediterranean to the Caucasus and the Caspian . Think of Andrew the fisherman venturing north-west to the Black Sea and founding churches in Byzantium - the future Constantinople - up the coast to Romania and on to where the Rus ’ would one day sink their Christian roots .
Imagine Paul on his journeys , and Barnabas settling on Cyprus , with Peter going west to Rome . Recall Thaddaeus and Thomas retracing the Magi ’ s steps along the merchant-route east , taking the gospel to Assyrians and Persia , and thence projecting it across the ocean to India . To Antioch ’ s south and east were those who , like Jesus and His disciples , spoke Aramaic , looking to the tradition of the apostle James , the brother of the Lord , at the Church in Jerusalem .
All these peoples and cultures came together in Antioch ; and here the Greeks provided an extra language by which they could communicate . The Churches descending from those the apostles founded , with their different traditions of worship and religion , are still present , even under the worst ever threat to their existence .
Thus ancient Syria , ‘ the cradle of Christianity ’, brought up diverse children in one family from the beginning – something that those who still insist that the Ordinariates should ‘ fit in ’ with the ‘ normal Catholic ’ Church would do well to remember . Let us
meet these equally ‘ normal ’ Catholic Churches , with their Orthodox counterparts , each looking to Antioch for their origins .
The Melkite Greek Catholic Church , whose pleas for solidarity in faith and aid we heard in January , belongs to the same liturgical family as the Ukrainian Catholic Church , and the Orthodox churches of Constantinople , Greece and Russia . Its head is the Patriarch of Antioch , Gregorios III , the successor of Peter in the Church ’ s second see after Jerusalem , before he established himself at Rome . Melkite means ‘ imperial ’, indicating the Christian community within the Greek-speaking world of the Roman and Byzantine empires .
Even though people say that the Catholic West and the Orthodox East split in the Great Schism of 1054 , the breach at first concerned only the Churches of the Empire ’ s two historic capital-city sees of Rome and Constantinople , not necessarily the others . Thus Antioch maintained communion , at least partially , with both . Enduring the rule of Muslims in the Ottoman Empire , a Church serving Arab and Aramaic-speaking communities needed to manifest a distinct identity from the Greeks , who dominated the Orthodox of the Empire from Istanbul , but under the thumb of the Sultan .
The Arab-Greek and Catholic-Orthodox ambiguities became polarised in the 17th century because of proselytisation by Latin-Church Jesuits , Capuchins and Carmelites , culminating in 1724 in the election of a pro-Catholic patriarch , who was promptly excommunicated by Constantinople . The Melkite Catholic Church , however , grew , because the rival Orthodox patriarchs were seen as subordinate to the Turks , controlled by Greeks , and unsympathetic to the local Church of Arabs and Aramaeans .
Thankfully , in the twentieth century these old wounds have considerably healed . Both sides consider that
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