The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> When Did We Become Nestorians?

When Did We Become Nestorians?
Posted by pancho (Guest) - Friday, January 18 2008, 22:18:24 (CET)
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Quoting Dr Joseph:

“When the Nestorians of the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran became an important focus of attention of the Western Protestant missions in the nineteenth century, some writers took the position that the use of the name Nestorian in reference to these Christians went back only to the seventeenth century when a considerable number of them reconciled with the Roman Catholic Church and were organized by it into a separate body. Those who remained loyal to their mother church (but never to Ashur, mine), we are told, were dubbed Nestorians.

The community, of course, was referred to as Nestorian long before the seventeenth century. Cosmas Indicopluestes spoke of “Nestorian” Christians as early as 525. To the medieval Arab authors they were known as “Nasturiyun” or al-Nasara, al-Nasturiyah (Nestorian Christians). Toward the end of the thirteenth century the traveler Burchard refereed to the Nestorians as constituting a “nation”.

Writing in mid-nineteenth century, when these Christians were yet to be called “Assyrian”, George P. Badger noted that he had in his possession an Arabic manuscript written by a Sleewa Bin Yohanan of Mosul dated A.D. 1332, in which the author explained that the Eastern Christians were called Nestorians because they had refused to excommunicate and anathematize Nestorius at the request of Cyril (d. 444). ‘And this name, wrote Ibn Yohanan, has been applied to us from that day up to the present.’

In time, these Eastern Christians began to refer to themselves as Nestorians. Mar ‘Abd Yeshu’ (Servant of Jesus), the Nestorian bishop of Nisibis in the thirteenth century, drew up a symbol of faith which he entitled ‘The Orthodox Creed of the Nestorians,’ and concluded the work with the statement that it was written in ‘the church of the blessed Nestorians’. The community continued to refer to itself as Nestorian through the nineteenth century. When in 1874 the Evangelical or Protestant section of the community was formally recognized as an organization separate from the mother church, it was referred to as the Reformed Nestorian Church. Some of the more educated members of the community began to resent the appellation toward the end of the nineteenth century when Western missionaries, especially those of the Church of England, made them conscious of the stigma and reproach of “heresy” that the term Nestorian was originally intended to convey. The Church was formally known simply as ‘The Old Church of the East’”.

And this term “Nestorian” survived, right there above our church doors, till 1976, when it was changed in favor of “Assyrian”.

Will Durant also speaks of the Christians living under Sasanid rule adopting the term Nestorian as a way of appeasing their Persian overlords who might suspect their loyalty when the Byzantine Romans adopted Christianity. For the same reason Christians of Iraq are suspected today when they align themselves with the enemies of Iraq, the Persian empire was wary that the Christians, who’d lived in peace till then among them, might form a fifth column within their empire, betraying Persia to their fellow-Christian Romans…and they were right. We’ve been traitors, “for Jesus”, to our own Betnahrain since then.

It wasn’t love of Nestorius or his peculiar take on Christianity that impressed the Christians of Persia….but when he was declared a heretic by the Romans and exiled along with his followers to Mesopotamia, the Persian Christians took on his beliefs and called themselves by his name as a way to show their masters that they would not and could not be friendly to Rome….since if Rome got its hands on them it would have killed, imprisoned or exiled them as well.

Ever since we let go of Ashur we’ve been the world’s whore.



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