than one Christ; hence he could not regard Christ as two persons; otherwise he would have said a Yes and a No in the same article, contradicting himself[1]. Nestorius, he says[2], rightly believed that Christ was God begotten of the Father from all eternity and man born of Mary the Virgin; and, he declares[3], it was right, too, that Mary did not bear the Godhead. But Luther thought that Nestorius as a rough and unlearned man did not comprehend the communicatio idiomatum, which in his opinion justifies the phrase that God was born of Mary, just as a mother (although the soul of her child does not come from her) is nevertheless not only the mother of the body, but the mother of the child[4].
Luther had but a very limited knowledge about Nestorius. To the increased knowledge of our day even before the discovery of the Treatise of Heraclides the doctrine of Nestorius showed itself in a still more favourable light. As early as ten years ago I wrote in the Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche: If Nestorius had lived in the time of the council of Chalcedon, he would possibly have become a pillar of orthodoxy[5]. Now the Treatise of Heraclides teaches us that Nestorius lived roughly speaking till the time of that council. Accurately speaking there is no trace of the Chalcedonian synod in the Treatise of Heraclides, and the passages which seem to point to the time following it
