Tradition · 431

Church of the East

The church of the Persian Empire and Mesopotamia, using Syriac, which did not accept the Council of Ephesus (431) and holds Church of the East Christology.

History

Roots

Christianity reached Mesopotamia early, through the Syriac-speaking city of Edessa and the Jewish communities of the region. The church’s own founding story names the apostle Thomas and his disciple Addai, who is said to have healed King Abgar of Edessa. The legend is told in the Doctrine of Addai (c. 400, tr. George Phillips, 1876, Archive.org). By the third century there were bishops across the Persian Empire, many of them in communities of deportees from the Roman East.

Being Christian in Persia meant living under a Zoroastrian state that saw the church as a Roman fifth column, especially once Constantine made Christianity Rome’s favoured religion. Under Shapur II (309–379) the church went through a long persecution. Its first great writer, Aphrahat, “the Persian Sage”, wrote his Demonstrations in those years (selected Demonstrations in Schaff’s Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 2, vol. 13, CCEL). His theology is biblical and Semitic and owes almost nothing to Greek philosophy.

Causes

The church organised itself before it broke with anyone. The synod of Seleucia-Ctesiphon in 410, under Catholicos Isaac, accepted the creed of the Council of Nicaea and set up a hierarchy of metropolitans under the bishop of the Persian capital. The synod of Markabta in 424, under Dadisho, declared that the catholicos could not be judged by the bishops of the West. Both acts are in the Synodicon Orientale (ed. J.-B. Chabot, 1902, Archive.org). Independence came for political reasons first: a church that appealed to Antioch or Constantinople invited suspicion from the Persian king.

Theology then followed the border. When the Council of Ephesus deposed Nestorius in 431 and later condemned the Antiochene tradition behind him, the Persian church was not present and did not accept the verdict. Teachers expelled from the “school of the Persians” at Edessa moved to Nisibis, on the Persian side, under Narsai and Bishop Barsauma. The synod of 486 under Acacius adopted a confession of two natures in one Christ and also allowed all clergy, bishops included, to marry. The long story of the Christological break is told under Church of the East Christology.

Influence

From the sixth to the fourteenth century this was the most widespread church on earth by geography. A monastic revival led by Abraham of Kashkar (d. 588) on Mount Izla filled Mesopotamia with monasteries; Thomas of Marga’s Book of Governors (840, tr. E. A. Wallis Budge, 1893, Archive.org) records their history. After the Arab conquest the catholicos moved to Baghdad. Christian scholars there translated Greek philosophy and medicine into Syriac and Arabic for the Abbasid court, and Catholicos Timothy I (780–823) debated the faith before Caliph al-Mahdi (Timothy’s Apology for Christianity, tr. Alphonse Mingana, in Woodbrooke Studies 2, 1928, Archive.org).

Missionaries carried the church along the trade routes. In India it supplied bishops to the St Thomas Christians of the Malabar coast for over a millennium. In China a stone set up at Xi’an in 781 records the monk Alopen’s arrival at the Tang court in 635 (P. Y. Saeki, The Nestorian Monument in China, 1916, Archive.org). Turkic and Mongol tribes in Central Asia converted in numbers (Mingana, The Early Spread of Christianity in Central Asia and the Far East, 1925, Archive.org). Under the Mongols a monk from Beijing became Catholicos Yahballaha III (1281), and his companion Rabban Sauma travelled as an envoy to Constantinople, Rome and Paris (The Monks of Kublai Khan, tr. Budge, 1928, Archive.org).

Decline and division

The collapse was fast. The Mongol rulers of Persia converted to Islam, the Chinese and Central Asian churches vanished, and the campaigns of Timur around 1400 destroyed much of what was left in Mesopotamia. The church survived mainly among Assyrian Christians in the mountains of Hakkari and the plains around Mosul. From the mid-fifteenth century the patriarchate passed from uncle to nephew within one family.

Discontent with that hereditary succession led to the schism of 1552. A party in Mosul chose the monk Yohannan Sulaqa as patriarch and sent him to Rome, where he entered communion with the pope in 1553. His line, after several reversals, became the Chaldean Catholic Church. In India the Portuguese brought the St Thomas Christians under Latin control at the Synod of Diamper (1599), cutting their link with the Mesopotamian patriarch; their descendants are now divided among Catholic, Orthodox and other churches.

The twentieth century nearly destroyed the church. In the First World War Ottoman and Kurdish forces killed a large part of the Assyrian population, and Patriarch Shimun XIX Benyamin was murdered in 1918. After the Simele massacre in Iraq (1933), Patriarch Shimun XXI Eshai was exiled and eventually settled in the United States. In 1964 he moved the church from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. Opponents of the change and of hereditary succession consecrated Thoma Darmo as a rival patriarch in Baghdad in 1968, founding the Ancient Church of the East (overview, secondary). A synod abolished hereditary succession in 1973. Shimun XXI was assassinated in California in 1975, and in 1976 Dinkha IV was elected as the first patriarch chosen outside the family line.

The larger body took the name Assyrian Church of the East (official site). Its patriarchate sat in Tehran and then Chicago, and returned to Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan under Gewargis III (2015–2021). Mar Awa III, elected in 2021 and born in Chicago in 1975, is the first Western-born patriarch (biography, secondary). Its members, a few hundred thousand, now live mostly in diaspora communities in North America, Europe and Australia, as well as Iraq, Iran, Syria and India.

Key ideas and contributors

A Semitic theology. The church thinks and prays in Syriac. Aphrahat and the poets who followed him, above all Narsai at Nisibis, wrote theology as biblical commentary and hymnody. That makes the church a living witness to a form of Christianity that grew up outside the Greek and Latin worlds.

Theodore the Interpreter. The church’s doctrinal authority is Theodore of Mopsuestia, read in Syriac translation as “the Interpreter” of Scripture. Together with Diodore and Nestorius he is commemorated as one of the “Greek doctors”. Babai the Great (d. c. 628) gave the church’s Christology its fixed terms: one parsopa, two natures, two qnome. That Christology, with Mary called “Mother of Christ”, is set out in Church of the East Christology.

Autocephaly and synods. The catholicos-patriarch governs with a synod of bishops, and the church has always seen itself as an apostolic church equal to the sees of the Roman Empire. Its record of synods from 410 onward makes it one of the best-documented ancient churches on how it governs itself (Episcopal Polity on a Persian model).

Liturgy and sacraments. Its main eucharistic prayer, the Anaphora of Addai and Mari, may be one of the oldest in use anywhere. It also uses anaphoras attributed to Theodore and Nestorius. Its list of sacred mysteries is distinctive: alongside baptism, eucharist and ordination it counts the Holy Leaven (Malka), a portion of bread said to be renewed in an unbroken line from the Last Supper, and the sign of the cross. Its churches traditionally have no icons; the cross is the main object of veneration.

Mission without empire. For most of its history the church had no Christian state behind it. It lived as a minority under Zoroastrian, Muslim and Mongol rulers, and its missionaries travelled with merchants. Its spread from Iraq to China happened without political power, which makes it the main counterexample to the idea that early Christianity spread through empire.

Key controversies

Was it Nestorian? For centuries both Greek and Latin writers called it “the Nestorian church”, meaning it followed a man condemned as a heretic. The church rejects the name. Its theology came from Theodore and its own synods, not from Nestorius personally, and it holds that Ephesus condemned positions it never held. Sebastian Brock called the label “a lamentable misnomer” (1996, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library). The 1994 Common Christological Declaration between Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Dinkha IV accepted that the old divisions were “due in large part to misunderstandings.” The debate itself is covered under Church of the East Christology.

Union with Rome. The 1552 schism and the Synod of Diamper raise the same question from two sides. For Catholics and Chaldeans, union with Rome restored a lost communion. For the Church of the East it split its people and, in India, imposed Latin customs and burned Syriac books. Today the Chaldean Catholic Church is far larger than the Assyrian Church in Iraq. The two share a liturgy, and talks on reunion have come and gone without result.

A eucharist without the words of institution. The Anaphora of Addai and Mari has no continuous narrative of the Last Supper (“this is my body”). Western theology since the Middle Ages has held those words to be needed for a valid eucharist. In 2001 the Vatican nonetheless recognised the anaphora as valid and allowed Chaldean and Assyrian faithful to receive communion in each other’s churches when necessary (Guidelines for Admission to the Eucharist). Before the ruling, some Catholics had questioned the anaphora’s validity, because the Council of Florence defined the form of the sacrament as the Saviour’s own words (overview, secondary).

The 1964 split. On the surface the division into the Assyrian and Ancient churches was over the calendar. Underneath it lay resentment of the hereditary patriarchate and of a patriarch living in America, far from his flock in Iraq. The Ancient Church moved Christmas to the Gregorian date in 2010, and in 2015 the two churches came close to electing a single patriarch before the effort failed. They remain separate.

What remains unresolved

The church’s status in the wider Christian world still turns on Ephesus. Rome now accepts that its faith in Christ is orthodox, but neither side has reversed its condemnations: the Church of the East still honours Theodore and Nestorius, and the councils that condemned them remain binding for Catholics and Orthodox. A second question is survival. A church that once stretched from Iraq to China has been driven from most of its homeland by war and persecution, and its future is now being decided in diaspora parishes as much as in Erbil.