Mpashqana, the Interpreter Without Qualification

The Church of the East knows Theodore of Mopsuestia, who died in 428, simply as Mpashqana, the Interpreter, a title given without further qualification because no other figure is held to require the distinction. The Church of the East: An Illustrated History of Assyrian Christianity records that Theodore's Antiochene method of exegesis, historical and literal in its approach to scripture rather than allegorical in the manner favored by the rival school at Alexandria, became the normative method of biblical interpretation across the whole of East Syriac Christianity, shaping how generations of the church's scholars read and taught the text long after Theodore's own death. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church notes that Theodore's influence reached well beyond exegesis alone, since his christological vocabulary, distinguishing the divine and human natures in Christ with a precision his critics later read as excessive, underlies the two qnome formula that the Church of the East continues to confess as its own account of the incarnation, making Theodore not merely a respected commentator within the tradition but one of the formative sources of its distinctive theological language.