A Dictionary of All Religions and Religious Denominations/Jacobites

JACOBITES, a denomination of eastern christians in the sixth and seventh centuries, so denominated from Jacob Bardeus, or Ranzalus, a disciple of Eutyches and Dyoscorus. His doctrines spread in Asia and Africa to that degree, that the denomination of the Eutychians was swallowed up by that of the Jacobites, which also comprehended all the Monophysites of the East; i. e. such as acknowledged but one nature, and that human, in Jesus Christ; including the Armenians and Abyssinians. They denied the doctrine of the trinity, and made the sign of the cross with one finger, to intimate the oneness of the godhead.

The Jacobites are of two sects; some following the rites of the Latin church, and others continuing separated from the church of Rome.

The name Jacobites was used in England in the seventeenth century as a political distinction, to mark the adherents of king James II. who were also called Nonjurors. A term very near this, viz. Jacobins, was used also to designate the violent party in the French revolution, on account of their holding their meetings in a convent of Jacobins in Paris.