Ecclesiastical Chronicle, Volume 1

It would be clearly useless to recount in detail everything he accomplished over the next twenty years; for the author himself narrates these in a continuous series and without any artifice in the other section of the Chronicle. He truly undertook great labors; he either restored many churches and monasteries or raised them from their foundations. He appointed twelve bishops, and in choosing them he earned the praise of having, while disregarding human affection, preferred men who were conspicuous in doctrine and excellent in morals.

He dies.

Finally, at the age of sixty, he died on the 30th of July, 1286, in the city of Maragha, in the province of Adorbigan (Azerbaijan) in Persia, to which he had recently arrived from Mosul. There, his funeral was solemnly celebrated not only by the few Jacobites who were present, but also by Nestorians, Greeks, and Armenians, as has been handed down to us by Barsuma Safi, his brother.

Barhebræus devoted to the Jacobite sect.

Having reviewed the principal deeds of Gregory Barhebræus, his theological doctrine must be weighed. As long as he lived, Barhebræus strenuously defended, by voice and writing, the Jacobite heresy in which he had been raised by his parents, and he did everything possible to secure the favor of princes for his sect.

The author of Monophysitism: Eutyches.

Now, the Jacobites in Syria and Mesopotamia, just as the Copts in Egypt, the Ethiopians in Abyssinia, and a portion of the Armenians in the Turkish Empire, belong to the heresy of the Monophysites, or those who assert one nature in Christ after the incarnation. Everyone knows that this perverse opinion was invented or first publicly advocated in the fifth century by Eutyches, a priest and archimandrite of Constantinople. For, in order to avoid the pitfalls of Nestorianism, recently condemned at Ephesus, he fell with unskilled zeal into the opposite error, by which he affirmed: "Our Lord Jesus Christ ought not to be confessed as being of two natures after the incarnation, in one subsistence and in one person; nor is the flesh of the Lord consubstantial with us, as having been assumed from us and united to the Word of God by subsistence; but he said that the Virgin who bore him was indeed consubstantial with us according to the flesh, but the Lord himself had not taken flesh consubstantial with us from her."

See original text for Greek: "Saying that our Lord Jesus Christ ought not to be confessed as being of two natures after the incarnation, in one subsistence, and in one person recognized by us, nor indeed is the flesh of the Lord consubstantial with us, as having been assumed from us and united to the Word of God according to subsistence; but he said that the Virgin who bore him according to the flesh is consubstantial with us, but the Lord himself had not received from her flesh consubstantial with us."