They agreed with Byzantines in observing Lent, Christmas and Epiphany, but differed from them in the observance of all other feasts and fasts. The Latin church tried in vain during the Crusades to secure their adhesion to Rome. The barbaric invasions of the 13th and 14th centuries fell with crushing force on the Nestorians. In 1258 Hulagu Khan took Bagdad, and about 1400 Timur again seized and sacked the city. Though the Nestorians were numerous, their moral influence and their church life had greatly deteriorated. Those who escaped capture by Timur fled to the mountains of Kurdistan, and the community that had played so large a part in Mesopotamian history for a thousand years was thus shattered. In 1552 they were further weakened by a large secession known as “the Chaldeans.” arising out of a dispute about the succession to the patriarchate. The discontented appealed to Rome, and the pope (Julius III.) consecrated the Chaldean catholikos. The Chaldeans are now chiefly found in rural districts east of the Tigris. They have a see at Bagdad, a monastery (Rabban Hormuz) at Elkoösh, and are called by those Syrian Christians who have resisted the papal overtures, Maghlabin (“the conquered”). Other attempts during the 16th century to promote union between the Nestorians and Rome proved fruitless, but the Roman Church has never ceased in its efforts to absorb this ancient community. The history of the Jacobites or Syrian Monophysites who, like the Nestorians, diverged from the Byzantine Church, but in an exactly opposite direction, is told elsewhere (see Jacobite Church, &c.). Like the Nestorians they were great missionaries, and up to the 7th century, and again in the 12th and 13th, produced the bulk of Syriac literature (q.v.). The chief Nestorian authors were (a) in the 7th, 8th and 9th centuries, Babbai the elder and Isho-yabh of Gedhala, commentators; Sahdona, who wrote on the monastic life; Abraham the Lame, a devotional and penitential writer; Dionysius of Tell Mahre (see Dionysius Telmaharensis), whose Annals are important; and Thomas (q.v.) of Marga; (b) in the 14th century, Abdh-isho bar Berikha (d. 1318) the author of a theological treatise Marganitha (“the Pearl”), 1298, and the Paradise of Eden, a collection of 50 theological poems.
§ 3. The Nestorian Missionary Enterprise.—The combined hostility of the orthodox church and the Byzantine empire drove the Nestorians into exile, but they went much further than was needed simply to secure immunity from persecution. They showed a zeal for evangelization which resulted in the establishment of their influence throughout Asia, as is seen from the bishoprics founded not only in Syria, Armenia, Arabia and Persia, but at Halavan in Media, Merv in Khorasan, Herat, Tashkent, Samarkand, Baluk, Kashgar, and even at Kambaluk (Pekin) and Singan fu Hsiʽen fu in China, and Kaljana and Kranganore in India. In 1265 they numbered 25 Asiatic provinces and over 70 dioceses. Mongolian invasions and Mahommedan tyranny have, of course, long since swept away all traces of many of these. The 400,000 Syrian Christians (“Christians of St Thomas,” see Thomas, St) who live in Malabar no doubt owe their origin to Nestorian missionaries, the stories of the evangelization of India by the Apostles Thomas and Bartholomew having no real historical foundation, and the Indian activity of Pantaenus of Alexandria having proved fruitless, in whatever part of India it may have been exercised. The theology of the Indian Syrian Christians is of a Nestorian type, and Cosmas Indicopleustes (6th century) puts us on the right track when he says that the Christians whom he found in Ceylon and Malabar had come, from Persia (probably as refugees from persecution, like the Huguenots in England and the Pilgrim Fathers in America). Pahlavi inscriptions[1] found on crosses at St Thomas’s Mount near Madras and at Kottayam in Travancore, are evidence both of the antiquity of Christianity in these places (7th or 8th century), and for the semi-patripassianism (the apparent identification of all three persons of the Trinity in the sufferer on the cross) which marked the Nestorian teaching. In 745 Thomas of Kana brought a new band of emigrants from Bagdad and Nineveh, and possibly the name “Christians of St Thomas” arose from confusion between this man and the apostle. Other reinforcements came from Persia in 822, but the Malabar church never developed any intellectual vigour or missionary zeal. They had their own kings, lived as a close caste, and even imitated the Hindus in caste regulations of food and avoidance of pollution. In 1330 Pope John XXII. issued a bull appointing Jordanus, a French Dominican, bishop of Quilon, and inviting the Nestorians to enter “the Christian Church.” The invitation was declined, but in the 16th century the Syrian Christians sought the help of the Portuguese settlers against Mussulman oppression, only to find that before long they were subjected to the fiercer perils of Jesuit antagonism and the Inquisition. The Syrians submitted to Rome at the synod of Dampier in 1599, but it was a forced submission, and in 1653 when the Portuguese arrested the Syrian bishop just sent out by the Catholicus of Babylon, the rebellion broke out. The renunciation was not quite thorough, one party adhering to the Roman Church as Romo-Syrians, the others reverting wholly to Syrian usages and forming to-day about three-fourths of the whole community. In 1665 a curious thing happened. Gregory, the Jacobite metropolitan of Jerusalem, visited Malabar, and, as the people had no consecrated bishop at the time, he consecrated Mar Thomas, who had been filling the office at the people’s request, and remained in the country jointly administering the affairs of the Church with Thomas. Thus the Nestorian Church in India, voluntarily and with perfect indifference to theological dogmas, passed under Jacobite rule, and when early in the 18th century, Mar Gabriel, a Nestorian bishop, came to Malabar, he had a cool reception, and could only detach a small following of Syrians whom he brought back to the old Nestorianism. The approaches of the Anglican Church through the Church Missionary Society in the first part of the 19th century were politely repelled. On the death of the bishop Mar Athanasius Matthew in 1877, litigation began as to his successor; it lasted ten years, and the decision (since reversed) was given against the party that held by the Nestorian Connexion and the habitual autonomy of the Malabar church in favour of the supremacy of the Jacobite patriarch of Antioch. The great need of the Indian Syrian church to-day is an educated ministry.
Early evidence of Nestorian missions in China is extant in the tablet found in 1625 at Changʽan in the district of Hsiʽen-fu, province of Shensi. It commemorates “the introduction and propagation of the noble law of Ta t’sin in the Middle Kingdom,” and beneath an incised cross sets out in Chinese and Syriac an abstract of Christian doctrine and the course of a Syrian mission in China beginning with the favourable reception of Olopan, who came from Judaea in 636. For two generations the little cause prospered, and again after persecutions in 699 and 813. Later on a second mission arrived, many churches were built and several emperors patronized the faith. This evidence is confirmed by (a) the canon of Theodore of Edessa (800) allowing metropolitans of China, India and other distant lands to send their reports to the catholikos every six years; (b) the edict of Wu Tsung destroying Buddhist monasteries and ordering 300 foreign priests to return to the secular life that the customs of the empire might be uniform; (c) two 9th-century Arab travellers, one of whom, Ibn Wahhab, discussed the contents of the Bible with the emperor; (d) the discovery in 1725 of a Syrian MS. containing hymns and a portion of the Old Testament.
In the 10th century the Nestorians introduced Christianity into Tartary proper; in 1274 Marco Polo saw two of their churches. The legend of Prester John is based on the idea of the conversion of a Mongol tribe, the Karith, whose chieftain Ung Khan at baptism received the title Malek Juchana (King John). And there has lately come to light a MS. of the 9th or 10th century in Sogdianese, an Indo-Iranian language spoken in the north-east of Asia, which shows that the Nestorians had translated the New Testament into that tongue and had taught the natives the alphabet and the doctrine. Their activity may well be said to have covered the continent. Their campaign was one of deliberate conquest, one of the greatest ever planned by
- ↑ “In punishment by the cross (was) the suffering of this One; He who is the true Christ, and God alone, and Guide ever pure.”
