Church has never been challenged. There have, of course, been disputes over the succession, which has been claimed by two rival lines since the seventeenth century; and there have been occasional vacancies; but the right of this throne to the Catholicate has been axiomatic.
The title, henceforth used habitually and regularly[1] by the Bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, and still employed by his successors (though in the course of the next half-century they began to use the term Patriarch along with it, and still continue to do so), needs a word of explanation. In the Roman Empire it was the name of a civil and financial office; but previously to its use as an ecclesiastical title in Persia it had been adopted by the Armenians as the title of the principal bishop of their national Church. It was probably from them that the Bishops of Seleucia adopted the word, and they used it in the same sense.[2]
The office, as we have seen, was a natural growth from the conditions of Christian life in Persia. In later ages men felt obliged to account for the origin of the Patriarchate, as it has by that time become,[3] by the fiction of a grant made in the year 190 by
- ↑ The word is used in the acts of Shimun and his two successors (Bedj., ii. 134, 276, 296). Previously, there was hardly opportunity for official use.
- ↑ See Dict. Christian Antiquities, and Procopius De Bello Persico, ii. 25. It is noteworthy that Assyrian writers also use the term for the prelate whom we should certainly call "Patriarch" of Antioch. Chabot, Syn. Or., 18, 255. An expert in hierarchical precedence may say what the difference between Catholicos and patriarch ought to be, but to a Persian in the early fifth century, they were practically interchangeable terms.
- ↑ See Ass., iii. 59, note 4. It will be seen that the theory first broached by Assemani, and accepted by others (E. G. Neale, but not by Labourt), that Seleucia was a metropolitan in the Antiochene patriarchate till the Nestorian controversy, is rendered untenable by the evidence of the Synodicon and Mshikha-Zca.
