Gregorios Abdal Jaleel

Mar Gregorios Abdal Jaleel Bawa (died 27 April 1681) was a Syriac Orthodox bishop of Jerusalem from 1664 until his death. He is chiefly remembered for his 1665 mission to India, in which he established ties between the Malankara Church and the Syriac Orthodox church. He is venerated as a saint by his church.

Abdal Jaleel was born in Mosul, Iraq. In 1654 he was ordained metropolitan bishop for the Ameed (Diyarbaker) diocese in Turkey by the Patriarch Mar Ignatius She'mun. In 1664, he was elevated as the Metropolitan of Jerusalem with the title Mor Gregorios. He traveled to India in 1665 to regularize the ordination of Mar Thoma I, archdeacon of the Saint Thomas Christian community whom been declared a bishop by his followers after refusing to submit to the Portuguese. In India Gregorios established ties between Thoma's Malankara Church and the Syriac Orthodox Patriarch, and introduced the West Syrian Rite (later known as the Malankara Rite in India). He died in India in 1681, and his remains are interred in the St. Thomas Church at North Paravur. On April 4, 2000, Patriarch Ignatius Zakka I declared Mar Gregorios Abdal Jaleel a saint.

Thomas Christians are popularly and traditionally called as Syrian Christians, a term associated with the Church of the East.The name Syrian came to refer to those Christians connected with the Church of the East at the very beginning of Christianity. It was referred to as the Syrian Church in the epistle of St. Ignatius (the third Patriarch of Antioch), to the Romans in AD 107. The Syrian Christian label was also attached to the Churches in Syria, which was submitted to the ecclesiastical authority of the Church of Antioch in the ancient capital of Roman Syria.

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