NESTORIANS. The followers of Nestorius (ft. 431 A.D.), patriarch of Constantinople. who in turn was an adherent of Theodore of Mopsuestia. The tendency of Nestoriauism was to fix attention on the human element in Jesus Christ. Objecting to the designation of the Virgin Mary as theotokos, " who gives birth to God," Nestorius followed Theodore of Mopsuestia in contending that " she only gave birth to a man in whom the union with the Logos had its beginning, but was incomplete until His baptism." Jesus Christ was not God but " God bearer " (theophoros). Nestorius was condemned in his absence by the synod of Ephesus (431 A.D.), but Nes torianism was not checked in its career. " An energetic Nestorian Church, in its missionary zeal, carried the con demned tenets first to Edessa, and then. on the suppres sion of that school in 489, to the ends of the earth. Persia, India, China—as the tablets of Si-ngan-fu (63(1 781) bear evidence—alike witnessed their activity. From the eleventh century until almost blotted out by Tamer lane, the Nestorian Church was the largest Christian body in the world, whose patriarch at Bagdad was acknowledged by twenty-five metropolitans. On the con
quest of Persia and the East by the Muslim, Nestorianism was thrown into an alliance, by no means unfriendly. with the new faith. To this we trace the rise in Mohammedan Spain in medieval times of a new form of this Nestorian doctrine to which the title of Adoptionism is more strictly applied " (H. B. Workman). Nestorian missions had great success in China. In fact, the activity of the missionaries covered a whole continent. and, according to Marco Polo (c. 1274 A.D.), the Nes torians had an unbroken series of see-towns along the trade-routes from Bagdad to Pekin. " The present patriarch of this dwindled sect lives in the Kurd Moun tains near Lake Urumiyah, with a flock of 70,000 souls. the Assyrian Christians, sole remnants of a once mighty organization " (F. W. Bussell).