JACOBITE CHURCH. The name of "Jacobites" is first found in a synodal decree of Nicaea A.D. 787, and was invented by hostile Greeks for the Syrian monophysite Church as founded, or rather restored, by Jacob or James Baradaeus, who was ordained its bishop A.D. or 543. James was born a little before A.D. Soo 'In the published reports only the speeches of members are given, not the interruptions from the tribunes. But see the report (May 18, 1793) of Dutard to Garat on a meeting of the Jacobins (Schmidt, Tableaux ii. 242) .
at Tella or Tela, 55 m. east of Edessa, of a priestly family, and entered the convent of Phesilta on Mount Isla. About 528 he went with a fellow-monk Sergius to Constantinople to plead the cause of his co-religionists with the empress Theodora, and lived there fifteen years. Justinian during those years imprisoned, de prived or exiled most of the monophysite clergy of Syria, Meso potamia, Cilicia, Cappadocia, and the adjacent regions. Once
ordained bishop of Edessa, with the connivance of Theodora, James, disguised as a ragged beggar, traversed these regions preaching, and ordained many thousands of clergy. He died in 578. In the middle ages there were 150 Jacobite archbishops and bishops under a patriarch, but in 1842, the Jacobites in all Turkey had dwindled to about ioo,000 souls.
See A. J. Maclean, art. "Syrian Christians" in Hastings' Encyclo paedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. xii. pp. 172 ff., with many ref., G. P. Badger, The Nestorians, 1852 ; 0. H. Parry, Six Months in a Syrian Monastery, 1895i R. Duval, La literature syriaque, 5899 ; F. C. Burkitt, Early Eastern Christianity, 1904.