Churches Beyond Chalcedon

Three families, not two

Most Westerners think of the great divisions of Christianity as Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant. But the oldest lasting divisions came much earlier, from the councils of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451) (see Ephesus and Chalcedon). By the 500s there were three families of churches, each convinced that it held the true faith about Christ:

1. The Chalcedonians, supported by the Roman emperors in Constantinople and the popes in Rome. They later split into Catholic and Eastern Orthodox.
2. The Miaphysites, who rejected Chalcedon and held to Cyril's "one nature." Today they are the Oriental Orthodox churches: Coptic, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Syriac, Armenian and Malankara (Indian).
3. The Church of the East, centered in Persia, which honored Nestorius' teacher Theodore of Mopsuestia and rejected Ephesus. Outsiders often called it "Nestorian," a label it considers misleading.

Diarmaid MacCulloch gives these churches much more space than most Western histories do. He calls this part of his story "Vanishing Futures," because they might have shaped world Christianity in a quite different direction [check].

The family tree of the ancient churches

The Miaphysite churches

After Chalcedon, Egypt and much of Syria simply refused to accept the council. For Egyptians, loyalty to Cyril and to their own patriarch of Alexandria was also loyalty to Egypt against Greek-speaking Constantinople. The emperors tried everything: compromise formulas, exiling bishops, and installing pro-Chalcedonian patriarchs who needed soldiers to protect them. In Alexandria, rival patriarchs were murdered by mobs.

The great Miaphysite theologian Severus of Antioch of Antioch (c. 465–538) was deposed and spent years in exile in Egypt. Protected secretly by the empress Theodora, wife of Justinian I, the Miaphysites survived. The key figure in building their church was a monk named Jacob Baradaeus ("Jacob the ragged," from the horse-blanket he wore as a disguise). Consecrated bishop around 542, he traveled tirelessly across Syria, Asia Minor and Egypt for over thirty years, ordaining reportedly dozens of bishops and thousands of priests. He created a complete parallel hierarchy. The Syriac Orthodox Church was long nicknamed the "Jacobite" church after him.

The Miaphysite family includes:

• The Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt, led by the Pope of Alexandria, the largest Christian community in the Middle East today.
• The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church (tewahedo means "made one," referring to Christ's united nature), one of the world's largest Orthodox churches.
• The Syriac Orthodox Church, with its patriarch of Antioch, now based in Damascus.
• The Armenian Apostolic Church, which rejected Chalcedon partly because its bishops were absent fighting the Persians in 451.
• Parts of the ancient Indian church, which later joined the Syriac Orthodox tradition.

When the Arab Muslim armies arrived in the 630s, some Miaphysite Christians in Egypt and Syria initially found Muslim rule less oppressive than Byzantine persecution. That is a striking measure of how bitter the Christian divisions had become (see The Challenge of Islam).

The Church of the East

The Christians of the Persian Empire had always lived outside Rome's borders (see Countries of the Sunrise). At the Synod of Seleucia-Ctesiphon in 410 they organized themselves under a chief bishop, the Catholicos, in the Persian capital. In 424 they declared that he answered to no Western bishop, which gave them a useful sign of independence from Rome's enemy.

Their theology came from the school of Antioch, especially Theodore of Mopsuestia. When Antiochene theologians were driven out of the Roman Empire after Ephesus and Chalcedon, many fled to Persia. The famous theological "School of the Persians" in Edessa, closed by Emperor Zeno in 489, moved to Nisibis inside Persia and became a great center of learning. The Church of the East formally embraced a two-nature Christology close to Nestorius' views, and it honors him as a saint.

Syriac was its language, and its heroes included the poet Ephrem the Syrian the Syrian, whom all churches share. Its scholars later translated Greek philosophy and science into Syriac and then Arabic. They played a key role in passing Aristotle and Greek medicine to the Islamic world, and through it, much later, back to medieval Europe.

Missions across Asia

What makes the Church of the East astonishing is its expansion. Traveling with merchants along the Silk Road and sea routes, its monks and bishops planted churches across Central Asia: in Merv, Samarkand and Herat, among the Turkic peoples, in Tibet, in India, and as far as China.

In 1625, workers near Xi'an in China dug up a tall stone monument, the Xi'an Stele, erected in 781. In Chinese and Syriac, it records that a missionary named Alopen arrived at the Tang dynasty capital in 635, bringing scriptures. The emperor Taizong examined the teaching, approved it, and permitted a monastery to be built. The stele calls Christianity the "Luminous Religion" (Jingjiao). It presents Christian doctrine using Buddhist and Daoist vocabulary, a bold early attempt at expressing the faith in Chinese terms. Other Chinese Christian texts from this period, the "Jesus Sutras," were found in caves at Dunhuang.

Under Catholicos Timothy I I (780–823), who ruled from Baghdad under the Muslim caliphs, the Church of the East may have had more bishops and a larger territory than the churches of Rome and Constantinople combined. Timothy oversaw metropolitan provinces from Syria to China and debated Christianity politely with the Caliph al-Mahdi, a famous conversation that survives in writing.

Why the Asian churches faded

The Church of the East did not last as a great Asian church. In China, an imperial crackdown on foreign religions in 845 largely destroyed it. It revived among the Mongols in the 1200s, when several Mongol princesses and nobles were Christians. Then the conversion of the western Mongol rulers to Islam, and the devastating campaigns of the conqueror Timur (Tamerlane) around 1400, nearly wiped it out across Central Asia. By 1500 it survived mainly in the mountains of Kurdistan and northern Iraq, and among the Saint Thomas Christians of India.

MacCulloch reflects on why. The Church of the East never had the backing of a powerful Christian state. It lived always as a minority under Zoroastrian, Muslim, Buddhist or Confucian rulers. Its story is a reminder that history's winners are not inevitable, and that a very different, Asian Christianity was once possible [check].

Today, the heirs of the Church of the East are the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East, along with the Chaldean Catholic Church, which joined Rome in 1553. They have suffered terribly in modern Iraq and Syria, and many have emigrated to the West.