NESTORIANS. The present article deals not with the life and doctrine of Nestorius (q.v.) but with the Eastern Churches called by his name.
A christology of the kind usually called Nestorian was eagerly and successfully propagated in Syria and Persia by Ibas, bishop of Edessa (435) and Barsumas, bishop of Nisibis. In Persia the old churches were stimulated into vigour and new ones founded. Their centre was at Ctesiphon on the Tigris, a busy trading city. The church traced its doctrines to Theodore of Mopsuestia rather than to Nestorius, whose name at first they repudiated, not regard ing themselves as having been proselytized to any new teaching. After the Mohammedan invasion of Persia early in the 7th century the Nestorians were able to come to terms with the invaders; and for five centuries the Nestorians were a recognized institu tion within the territory of Islam, though their treatment varied from kindly to harsh. But the barbaric invasions of the 13th and 4th centuries fell with crushing force on the Nestorians. In 1258 Hulagu Khan took Baghdad, and about 1400 Timur again seized and sacked the city. Though the Nestorians were numerous, their moral influence and their church life had greatly deteriorated. Those who escaped capture by Timur fled to the mountains of Kurdistan, and the community that had played so large a part in Mesopotamian history for a thousand years was thus shattered. Various attempts during the 16th century to promote union between the Nestorians and Rome proved fruitless, but the Roman Church has never ceased in its efforts to absorb this ancient com munity.
The Nestorians showed a zeal for evangelization which resulted in the establishment of their influence throughout Asia, as is seen from the bishoprics founded not only in Syria, Armenia, Arabia and Persia, but at Halavan in Media, Mery in Khurasan, Herat, Tashkent, Samarkand, Baluk, Kashgar, and even at Kambaluk (Pekin) and Singan fu (Hsi`en fu) in China, and Kaljana and Kranganore in India. Mongolian invasions and Mohammedan tyranny have, of course, long since swept away all traces of many of these. The 400,000 Syrian Christians ("Christians of St. Thomas," see THOMAS, ST.) who lived in Malabar no doubt owed their origin to Nestorian missionaries, the stories of the evangeliza tion of India by the Apostles Thomas and Bartholomew having no real historical foundation, and the Indian activity of Pantaenus of Alexandria having proved fruitless, in whatever part of India it may have been exercised. The theology of the Indian Syrian
Christians is of a Nestorian type, and Cosmas Indicopleustes (6th century) puts us on the right track when he says that the Chris tians whom he found in Ceylon and Malabar had come from Persia (probably as refugees from persecution, like the Huguenots in England and the Pilgrim Fathers in America). Pehlevi inscrip tions found on crosses at St. Thomas's Mount near Madras and at Kottayam in Travancore, are evidence both of the antiquity of Christianity in these places (7th or 8th century), and for the semi-patri-passianism (the apparent identification of all three persons of the Trinity in the sufferer on the cross) which marked the Nestorian teaching. In 745 Thomas of Kana brought a new band of emigrants from Baghdad and Nineveh, and possibly the name "Christians of St. Thomas" arose from confusion between this man and the apostle. Other reinforcements came from Persia in 822, but the Malabar church never developed any intellectual vigour or missionary zeal. They had their own kings, lived as a close caste, and even imitated the Hindus in caste regulations of food and avoidance of pollution. In 133o Pope John XXII. issued a bull appointing Jordanus, a French Dominican, bishop of Quilon, and inviting the Nestorians to enter "the Christian Church." The invitation was declined, but in the 16th century the Syrian Chris tians sought the help of the Portuguese settlers against Mussul man oppression, only to find that before long they were subjected to the fiercer perils of Jesuit antagonism and the Inquisition. The Syrians submitted to Rome at the synod of Dampier in 1599, but it was a forced submission, and in 1653 when the Portuguese arrested the Syrian bishop just sent out by the catholicus of Baby lon, the rebellion broke out. The renunciation was not quite thor ough, one party adhering to the Roman Church as Romo-Syrians, the others reverting wholly to Syrian usages and forming to-day about three-fourths of the whole community.