The Tradition
One Faith, Six Churches
Gedam serves the Oriental Orthodox family — six ancient, self-governing churches that live in full communion with one another.
- the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria,
- the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church,
- the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church,
- the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch,
- the Armenian Apostolic Church, and
- the Malankara (Indian) Orthodox Church.
They are not branches of a single church. Each is an ancient apostolic church with its own language, chant, and rite, founded in a different land. What makes them one family is not a shared origin but a shared confession of faith.
The faith that unites them
The Oriental Orthodox confess, with Saint Cyril of Alexandria, the one incarnate nature of God the Word — that Christ is perfect in His divinity and perfect in His humanity, united in one without mingling, without confusion, without alteration, without division, and without separation. The Ethiopian and Eritrean name “Tewahedo” itself means “made one” — a confession of this very union of the divine and the human in Christ.
This faith is distinct from, and must never be confused with, the false teaching that Christ’s humanity was dissolved or absorbed into His divinity. The Oriental Orthodox have always rejected that error. They confess a full and complete humanity, united with the divinity in the one Christ.
How they became one family
The bond was sealed at the Council of Chalcedon in the year 451. Chalcedon defined that Christ is made known “in two natures.” The churches that became the Oriental Orthodox held instead to Saint Cyril’s expression — the one incarnate nature — and saw the new wording as risking a division of the one Lord. They therefore did not receive Chalcedon, and from that point they stood together, recognizing one another’s confession. They share a common inheritance of the great teachers of the early Church, among them Saint Athanasius, Saint Cyril of Alexandria, and Saint Severus of Antioch.
In our own time, official theological dialogues between the Oriental Orthodox and the Eastern Orthodox have concluded that the two families confess the same faith in Christ, expressed in different words. They remain distinct communions, and full unity has not been restored.
Distinct apostolic roots
Three living traditions of worship
Within the one faith there are three great families of rite, shaped by fifteen centuries of distinct life across Egypt, Ethiopia, the Levant, Armenia, and India:
These differences — in language, chant, fasting custom, and calendar — are matters of practice and history, not of doctrine. Gedam honors each of them faithfully, and never presents one tradition’s practice, term, or date as another’s.
The Calendars
Why the Dates Differ
All six churches celebrate the same events — the Nativity, the Theophany, the Resurrection — yet often on different dates. The reasons are of history and calculation, never of belief.
The ancient Alexandrian reckoning
The Coptic and Ethiopian churches preserved the ancient calendar of Egypt — the very reckoning the whole early Church once relied upon to set the date of Easter, when Alexandria was Christendom’s authority on the calendar. Because that older (Julian-based) calendar now runs thirteen days behind the modern one, their December 25 falls on the common calendar’s January 7.
Calendar reforms at different times
The Armenian Church adopted the modern (Gregorian) calendar in 1923, and the Malankara Church in 1953. Their fixed feasts — and, for them, the date of Easter — therefore follow the modern calendar. The Coptic, Ethiopian, and Eritrean churches did not reform, and so preserve the older reckoning.
An ancient feast kept whole
In the earliest centuries, the Nativity and the Baptism of Christ were a single feast on January 6 — the Theophany, “God made manifest.” The West later set the Nativity on December 25. The Armenian Church alone preserved the original unified feast, which is why Armenian Christmas is January 6.
Different counts of the year
The churches even number their years from different starting points — the Ethiopian calendar from the Incarnation (some years behind the common count), the Coptic from the era of the Martyrs (the year 284). These are different beginnings, not disagreements.
Gedam computes each church’s calendar in its own reckoning, so the right dates appear for the right tradition, every year. See how — and how it is tested.
One family, kept faithfully
Read what Gedam offers each church.
Every tradition keeps its own fasts, feasts, readings, and saints. See what to expect from yours.
The Six Churches