![]() ![]() |
The Council of Chalcedon, convened by the Byzantine Emperor Marcian in the year 451 CE, in the town of Chalcedon (mod. Kadiköy, Turkey - a small town in European Turkey, 113 miles (182 km.) west of Istanbul at the point where the Gallipoli Peninsula meets the mainland), was the Fourth Ecumenical Council in the history of the Christian Church, and one of the best-documented of the early Councils. It has had one of the largest impacts upon the subsequent development of Christian faith and doctrine, inasmuch as it prescribed universal acceptance of the Nicene Creed, as well as the publication of two important doctrinal theses against Nestorian beliefs, and Pope Leo's Tome, a work explaining and defending objections to Monophysite beliefs. Predictable, certain Christian communities could not accept the rulings, and went their own path. These communions survived centuries of discord with their Orthodox neighbours, and achieved a stable presence in the Middle East, albeit a small one. Their descendents continue the traditions to this day, sometimes in locales undreamt-of in the 5th century. Although these communities were labeled as heretics by mainstream Christianity, their survival differentiates them from other heretical movements, and so I place them here rather than on the Heresiarchs page. This file contains: Alexandria (Coptic), Antioch (Jacobite), Armenian, Assyrian, Eritrean, Ethiopian, Jerusalem (Coptic), and Nestorian Patriarchates. |
The list is the same as that of the Orthodox patriarchs of Alexandria until the schism of the late 440's.
N.B.!! The Assyrian and Chaldean churches each hold to different chronologies for the Patriarchs until the early 1700's. This list is an attempt to reconcile the two lists but dates given before 1700 should be regarded as approximations.