Melchites

Melchites or Melkites , members of a Christian community in the Levant and the Americas, mainly Arabic-speaking and numbering about 250,000. They are in communion with the pope and have a Byzantine rite much like that of Constantinople but in the Arabic language. Their head, under the pope, is called patriarch of Antioch; he lives in Damascus or Egypt. The name Melchites (which derives from the Syriac word for "king" ) was first applied to all who followed the emperor Marcian in accepting the Council of Chalcedon (451) and came back into use in the 18th cent. to designate that segment of the Orthodox Eastern Church that reunited with Rome; it is now, however, also sometimes applied to the Orthodox of Syria and Egypt. Like the Maronites and the Syrian Catholics, the Melchite community has its own hierarchy under the pope and its own rite.

Bibliography: See D. Attwater, The Christian Churches of the East, Vol. I (1947).

Melchites or Melkites. Those Christians of Syria and Egypt who, refusing Monophysitism and accepting the Definition of Chalcedon (451), remained in communion with the see of Constantinople. Today the term is applied to the Christians of the Byzantine rite (particularly the Uniats, but to a lesser degree the Orthodox also) belonging to the Patriarchates of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria.

Melkites or Melchites (‘Emperor's men’, from Syriac malkaya, ‘imperial’). Christians of Syria and Egypt who accepted the Council of Chalcedon and remained in communion with Constantinople. After the rise of Islam their liturgical language became Arabic. Today the term embraces all Arabic-speaking Christians of the Byzantine rite, whether Orthodox or Uniat, in the patriarchates of Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria. The Orthodox number about 750,000, while the Uniats (for whom there has been a separate hierarchy since 1684) number c.400,000.