A Label the Church Never Chose for Itself

Nestorian was always an outsider's polemical term, never a name the church used for itself; it called itself simply the Church of the East, or, in the language of its own liturgy, the Assyrian Church of the East. Modern historical scholarship on Syriac Christianity, notably the work of Sebastian Brock, has argued that the church's mature Christology as fixed by Babai the Great is considerably more careful and more clearly dyophysite in a defensible, orthodox sense than what Nestorius himself was actually condemned for at Ephesus, and that continuing to use the label obscures the tradition's own theological development more than it explains it.

The church nonetheless suffered under the weight of that label for over a millennium, surviving the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, near destruction under Timur, and catastrophic massacres in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that scattered its remaining communities from their historic heartland in northern Mesopotamia across the world. Throughout, the church maintained a claimed apostolic succession tracing to Saint Thomas and to Saints Addai and Mari, and its Christology remains today formally unreconciled both with the Chalcedonian churches it never joined at Chalcedon in 451 and with the Oriental Orthodox churches, whose miaphysite Christology it has historically regarded as the opposite theological error from its own.