Jacob Baradaeus - Works

Works

While he dwelled at Constantinople — 15 years, according to John of Ephesus — the anti-Chalcedonians suffered greatly. Justinian I had resolved to enforce the decrees of the Council of Chalcedon, and those bishops and clergy who refused to obey these decrees Justinian punished with imprisonment, deprivation, and exile. Whole districts of Syria and the adjacent countries were thus deprived of their pastors, and the Monophysite were threatened with gradual extinction. For ten years many churches had been destitute of sacraments, which they refused to receive from those they considered heretics. The extreme peril of the Monophysites was represented to Theodora by the Ghassanid king al-Harith, and she persuaded Jacobus to leave his cell and accept the hazardous and laborious task of rebuilding the Antiochian church. A considerable number of Monophysite bishops from all parts of the East, including Theodosius of Alexandria, Anthimus the deposed patriarch of Constantinople, Constantius of Laodicea, John of Egypt, Peter and others, who had come to Constantinople in the hope of mitigating the displeasure of the emperor and increasing the sympathies of Theodora, were held by Justinian in one of the imperial fortresses under house arrest. They consecrated Jacobus to the episcopate, nominally as bishop of Edessa, but virtually as a metropolitan with ecumenical authority.

The date of Jacobus's consecrated is uncertain, but that given by Assemani (AD 541) is probably correct. The result proved the wisdom of their choice. Of the simplest mode of life, inured to hardship from his earliest years, tolerant of the extremities of hunger and fatigue, "a second Asahel for fleetness of foot", fired with an unquenchable zeal for what he regarded as the true faith, with a dauntless courage that despised all dangers, Jacobus, in his tattered beggar's disguise, traversed on foot the whole of Asia Minor, Syria, Mesopotamia and the adjacent provinces, even to the borders of Persia, everywhere ordaining bishops and clergy, encouraging his demoralized co-religionists to courageously maintain their faith against the advocates of the two natures, and organizing them into a compact spiritual body. By his indefatigable labours "the expiring faction was revived, and united and perpetuated... The speed of the zealous missionary was promoted by the fleetest dromedaries of a devout chief of the Arabs; the doctrine and discipline of the Jacobites were secretly established in the dominions of Justinian, and each Jacobite was compelled to violate the laws and to hate the Roman legislator".

Jacobus is said to have ordained the incredible number of 80,000 clergy. John of Ephesus says 100,000, including 89 bishops and two patriarchs. His remarkable success in reviving the moribund Syriac Orthodox church alarmed the emperor and the Chalcedonian bishops, who offered rewards for his arrest. But dressed in his beggar's garb, and aided by the friendly Arab tribes as well as the people of Syria and Asia, he eluded all attempts to seize him, living into the reign of Tiberius II Constantine. The longer of the two Lives of Jacobus, by John of Ephesus, recounts the extent and variety of his missionary labours and his miracles.