The Age of Monks and Empires · 424-651 · Persian Mesopotamia
The Church of the East under Persia
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About This Movement
In 424 the bishops of the Persian Empire declared that their catholicos at Seleucia-Ctesiphon answered to no bishop beyond their own frontier — a church living under a Zoroastrian shah, deliberately independent of the Roman world and its councils. It gave a different answer to the question of Christ than either Chalcedon or the Miaphysites, following the tradition of Theodore of Mopsuestia in holding firmly to the distinctness of his divinity and his humanity, and its opponents fixed the name "Nestorian" on it. Its intellectual centre was the School of Nisibis, which had written statutes governing the students' day, their lodging and their discipline. Formation documents of a kind almost nothing else this early has left. Its communion stretched far beyond Mesopotamia: the St Thomas Christians of India belonged to it. When the Sasanian empire fell to Arab armies by 651, the church carried straight on under new rulers and kept expanding eastward.
Sources
- Synodicon Orientale (ed./trans. J.-B. Chabot, 1902) (primary) — The Church of the East's own collected synods 410-775 - its constitutional self-record; Syriac with French translation only (no complete English); the indispensable institutional source.
- Adam H. Becker (trans.), Sources for the History of the School of Nisibis (TTH 50, 2008) (primary) — First English translations of the Cause of the Foundation of the Schools, Barhadbshabba's school narratives, and related texts - important formation-culture documents; in print (Liverpool UP).
- The Statutes of the School of Nisibis (ed./trans. A. Vööbus, 1961) (primary) — The school's actual rule-texts (496, 602) - formation documents found almost nowhere else; Syriac with English translation; older Estonian-series edition, findable in research libraries.
- Adam H. Becker, Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom (2006) (secondary) — Standard modern study of the School of Nisibis and East Syrian scholastic culture; Penn Press, in print.
- Richard E. Payne, A State of Mixture (2015) (secondary) — How East Syrian Christians actually lived within Sasanian political culture - corrects older persecution-only narratives; UC Press, in print.
- Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 2, ch. 4, 'Early Asian and East African Christianities' (David Bundy) (reference) — The reference-tradition chapter covering Christianity beyond the Roman frontier incl. the Persian church.