Persian Church of the East (early)

East of the Roman frontier, in the Persian Empire, were Christian communities that had never lived under a Christian emperor and never would. And Constantine's conversion made their position worse rather than better, since it let the Sassanian court read them as a Roman fifth column. The long persecution under Shapur II from about 340 killed clergy and laity in numbers this church remembered in a whole literature of martyr acts, its own head among them. The catholicos Shemon bar Sabbae was executed in the 340s after refusing to collect a punitive double tax from Christians to fund the war against Rome. When toleration eventually came, the church organized itself deliberately. A synod at Seleucia-Ctesiphon in 410 gave it a legal structure and a recognized head, and a further synod in 424 declared that its bishops would answer to no authority outside Persia. It worshipped in Syriac, thought in the exegetical idiom it shared with Edessa and Antioch, and was already becoming the church that would carry Christianity along the trade roads to India, Central Asia, and China.