From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

But my chief reason for rejoicing on our arrival at Mosul was that I there had a rare opportunity to complete observations which, during the greater part of our journey, I had been making on the condition and influence of what are known as the Eastern Churches. I do not speak of an “Eastern Church,” about which so much has been written, for such an organization, as contradistinguished from a Western Church, is mere fiction.

The noted Venetian traveler, Marco Polo, in writing of the inhabitants of Mosul, declares:

There is a kind of people called Arabi and these worship Mohammed.[318] Then there is another description of people who are called Nestorian and Jacobite Christians. These have a Patriarch whom they call the Jatolic [he means Catholic] and this Patriarch creates Archbishops and Abbots and Prelates of all other degrees and sends them into every quarter, as to India, to Baudas [Bagdad] or to Cathay, just as the Pope of Rome does in Latin countries. For you must know that though there is a very great number of Christians in those countries, they are all Jacobites and Nestorians; Christians, indeed, but not in the fashion enjoined by the Pope of Rome, for they come short in several points of the faith.[319]

Nearly five and a half centuries after the illustrious Venetian traveler had dictated these lines, the erudite historian and Orientalist, von Hammer-Purgstall, referring to the inhabitants of the terraced city of Mardin, located between Edessa and Mosul, wrote: “There Sunnis and Shias, Catholic and Schismatic Armenians, Jacobites, Nestorians, Chaldæans, Sun, Fire, Calf and Devil worshipers dwell one over the head of the other.”[320]

These two quotations from writers who lived in such widely separated periods give one a fair idea of what has long been the religious affiliations of the greater part of the population of Mesopotamia and what, with slight changes, they are still to-day.

Dismissing the Moslems and Pagans just mentioned as without the purview of this chapter, a few pages on the different Christian bodies above-mentioned will aid the reader to form an intelligent estimate of the present condition of some of these Churches of the East and of their relations to one another.

We begin with the Nestorians as they constitute the oldest of the existing dissident Churches. The Arians, Novatians, Paulinists, and scores of other heretics who gave such trouble to the early Christian Church have long disappeared and only students of heresiology now know what doctrines they really professed.

The distinguishing tenet of Nestorianism, which owes its origin to Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople from 428 to 431, is the assertion that in Christ there are two persons—the human and the divine—and the denial that the Mother of Christ is the Mother of God. The Catholic doctrine, as defined by the third Œcumenical Council held at Ephesus in 431, is that in Christ there is but one person—the person of the Son of God—and that the Blessed Virgin Mary is the Mother of God—Θεοτόκος.

From its beginning Nestorianism has been essentially an eastern organization and was early adopted by the successors of the “Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and inhabitants of Mesopotamia,” who, on the first Pentecost, were so amazed to hear the Apostles in Jerusalem speaking in divers tongues the wonderful works of God.[321]

On account of political and other reasons, the Nestorians soon became separated from the rest of Christendom. Banished from Edessa in 489 by the Emperor Zeno, they fled to Nisibis which then belonged to Persia. The Persian King, learning that they did not profess the same creed as that held by the Byzantines, with whom he was always at war, took them under his protection. From that time the Nestorian Church, which eventually became almost forgotten west of Mesopotamia, had an extraordinary development in the East. For, although from his palace, in the twin city of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the Nestorian Katholicos sent missionaries to Arabia and Syria and Egypt, by far the larger number went to far-off India and China. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when the Nestorian Church attained its greatest development, the jurisdiction of the Nestorian Katholicos rivaled in extent that of the greatest of the Byzantine Patriarchs. For then the supreme head of the Nestorians ruled over a vast number of bishops who were stationed at important points in Asia from Mosul to Malabar and from Jerusalem to Java and Peking.[322]