Nestorianism, the Church of the East, and a Late Rediscovery

The doctrine condemned under Nestorius's name holds that in Christ two natures, divine and human, subsist so distinctly as to verge on two persons or two sons joined by conjunction rather than union. Whether Nestorius taught that is a separate question. His slogans were harsher than his theology; his concern, inherited from the Antiochene school of Theodore of Mopsuestia, was to keep the sufferings of the man Jesus from being predicated crudely of God. In 1889 his own late apologia, hidden for centuries under the pseudonym Heracleides and preserved in Syriac, was rediscovered, and its publication launched a scholarly rehabilitation: many modern readers find in the Bazaar a Christology reconcilable with Chalcedon's two natures in one person, and conclude that Nestorius was condemned for a doctrine more extreme than his own.

The condemnation had one vast institutional consequence. The Church of the East, centered in the Persian empire beyond Roman reach, honored the Antiochene teachers, Theodore above all, refused the anathemas of Ephesus, and was branded Nestorian by its western rivals, a label it wore through its medieval expansion along the Silk Road to India and China and never chose for itself. Its modern successor, the Assyrian Church of the East, venerates Nestorius among its Greek teachers while insisting, with most modern scholarship, that its faith is not the two sons caricature the name came to mean.