Nestorians Sentence Examples

When, in the 5th century A.D., owing to theological differences the Syriac-using Christians became divided into Nestorians or East Syrians and Jacobites (Monophysites) or West Syrians, certain differences of pronunciation, chiefly in the vowels, began to develop themselves.

The biruna of the Chaldaean Nestorians, on the other hand, worn by all bishops, is a sort of hood ornamented with a cross.

Modern missions have made no great conquests there, and in earlier times the Nestorians and Jacobites who penetrated to central Asia, China and India, received respectful hearing, but never had anything like the success which attended Buddhism and Islam.

In Asia Minor the Kurdish troops under Ibrahim Pasha revolted, and, although they were defeated with the loss of their commander, the Kurds continued to attack indiscriminately the Turks, Nestorians and Armenians; disturbances also broke out among the other reactionary Moslems of this region, culminating in a massacre of the Armenians at Adana.

There are about 34,000 Jews occupying a quarter of their own in the north-western part of the city; while in a neighbouring quarter dwell upwards of 6000 Christians, chiefly so-called Chaldaeans or Nestorians.

The Melchites therefore are those who accept the decrees of Ephesus and Chalcedon as distinguished from the Nestorians and Jacobite Church (qq.v.).

The doctrines and the works the works of Aristotle had been transmitted by the of Aris- Nestorians to the Arabs, and among those kept alive by a tole.

At Edessa the result of the conflict between the Nestorians and their opponents was long doubtful.

His fellow-worker Narsai, whom the Jacobites called " the leper," but the Nestorians " the harp of the Holy Spirit," apparently accompanied Barsauma from Edessa to Nisibis, where according to Barhebraeus he lived for 50 years.

Marutha, who was Nestorian catholicus of Seleucia from about 540 to 552 1 and a man of exceptional energy, made the only known attempt, which was, however, unsuccessful, to provide the Nestorians with a Bible version of their own.

His translation, which was edited by Bickell with an introduction by Benfey, must be distinguished from the much later Syriac translation made from the secondary Arabic version and edited by Wright in 1884.2 Ilannana of I.Iedhaiyabh, who nearly produced a disruption of the Nestorian Church by his attempt to bridge over the interval which separated the Nestorians from Catholic orthodoxy, was the author of many commentaries and other writings, in some of which he attacked the teaching of Theodore of Mopsuestia.

In the 5th century they became Nestorians.

In their new environment the Nestorians abandoned some of the rigour of Catholic asceticism, and at a synod held in 499 abolished clerical celibacy even for bishops and went so far as to permit repeated marriages, in striking contrast not only to orthodox custom but to the practice of Aphraates at Edessa who had advocated celibacy as a condition of baptism.

The Nestorian Church in Eastern Syria and Persia was under the jurisdiction of an archbishop (catholikos), who in 498 assumed the title "Patriarch of the East" and had his seat at SeleuciaCtesiphon on the Tigris, a busy trading city and a fitting centre for the great area over which the evangelizing activity of the Nestorians now extended.

For five centuries the Nestorians were a recognized institution within the territory of Islam, though their treatment varied from kindly to harsh.

The barbaric invasions of the 13th and 14th centuries fell with crushing force on the Nestorians.

Though the Nestorians were numerous, their moral influence and their church life had greatly deteriorated.

Like the Nestorians they were great missionaries, and up to the 7th century, and again in the 12th and 13th, produced the bulk of Syriac literature (q.v.).

In the 10th century the Nestorians introduced Christianity into Tartary proper; in 1274 Marco Polo saw two of their churches.

They are divided into the Persian Nestorians of the plain of Azerbaijan, and the Turkish Nestorians, inhabiting chiefly the sanjak of Hakkiari in the vilayet of Van, who are subdivided into the Rayat or subject, and the Ashiret or tribal, the latter being semi-independent in their mountain fastnesses.

It is only of late years, under the influence of the different missions, that education, ruined by centuries of persecution, has revived amongst the Nestorians; and even now the mountaineers, cut off from the outer world, are as a rule destitute of learning, and greatly resemble their neighbours, the wild and uncivilized Kurds.

The Nestorians commemorate Nestorius as a saint, and invoke his aid and that of his companions.

To say that the modern Nestorians are not definitely and firmly orthodox is perhaps fairer than to charge them with being distinctly heretical.

The peculiar circumstances, both ecclesiastical and temporal, of the Nestorians have attracted much attention in western Christendom, and various missionary enterprises amongst them have resulted.

This mission enrolled a very large number of adherents drawn from the old Church, the Protestant Nestorians, and the UniatChaldeans, but it can hardly be said to have commenced any active work, although the Anglican mission withdrew from competition by closing its schools in the dioceses occupied by the Russians.

The Nestorians and Jacobites at the present day suppose it to begin with the following month, or October.

In the narrative of William Rubruquis (1253), though distinct reference is made to the conquering Gur Khan under the name of Coir Cham of Caracatay, the title of "King John" is assigned to Kushluk, king of the Naimans, who had married the daughter of the last lineal representative of the gur khans.(fn 2) And from the remarks which Rubruquis makes in connexion with this King John, on the habit of the Nestorians to spin wonderful stories out of nothing, and of the great tales that went forth about King John, it is evident that the intelligent traveller supposed this king of the Naimans to be the original of the widely spread legend.

We have little doubt that Abyssinia was the "regnum" here indicated, though it was a mistake to identify the Abyssinian Church with the Nestorians.

Its ancient form has been retained only by the Nestorians, who wear it crossed over the breast.

Of still more importance was the brisk commercial intercourse between central Asia and the countries of the Far East; for this led the Nestorians into China.

The middle ages were far more disastrous for the Monophysites than for the Nestorians; in their case there was no alternation of rise and decline, and we have only a long period of gradual exhaustion to chronicle.

Eugenius signed an agreement with the Armenians on the 22nd of November 1439, and with a part of the Jacobites in 1443; and in 1445 he received the Nestorians and Maronites.

But both these were Monophysite and of limited use, and the Nestorians still went on using the Peshito.

The decree for the Syrians, published at the Lateran on the 30th of September 1444, and those for the Chaldeans (Nestorians) and the Maronites (Monothelites), published at the last known session of the council on the 7th of August 1445, added nothing of doctrinal importance.

In the war of 421, in which the north-east of Mesopotamia was chiefly concerned, the Romans failed to take Nisibis, and it became a natural rallying point for the Nestorians after the decision of Ephesus (431).

The record of their work is told elsewhere (see Nestorius and Nestorians).

With the same object, though on different lines, the archbishop of Canterbury's Assyrian Mission seeks to influence the Nestorians.

The population is estimated at 852,000; Christians, 8000, principally Nestorians or Chaldaeans; Jews, 54,000; Moslems, 790,000, of whom the larger part are Shi`as.

The Nestorians and the Eutychian Monophysites were not threatened with such severe civil penalties, although their worship was interdicted, and their bishops were sometimes banished; but this vexatious treatment was quite enough to keep them disaffected, and the rapidity of the Mahommedan conquests may be partly traced to that alienation of the bulk of the Egyptian and a large part of the Syrian population which dates from Justinian's persecutions.

Another tradition - accepted by the Kurds, Syrians and Nestorians - fixes on Mount Judi, in the south of Armenia, on the left bank of the Tigris, near Jezire, as the Ark's resting-place.

Other religions are represented in Persia by about 80,000 to 90,000 Christians (Armenians, Nestorians, Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholics, Protestants), 36,000 Jews, and 9000 Zoroastrians.

The Nestorians in Persia, all living in cities and villages close to the Turkish frontier, numbered about 25,000 to 30,000 but many of them, some say half, together with two or three bishops, recently went over to the Greek Orthodox (Russian) Church, in consequence of the unsatisfactory protection afforded them by their patriarch, who resides in Mosul.

The Protestants, Europeans and natives (converted Armenians and Nestorians), number about 6500.

The Nestorians accept the decisions of the first two councils, and reject the decrees of all the rest as unwarranted alterations of the creed of Nicaea.

Hence the Nestorians, who insisted upon the duality of the natures to such a degree as to lose sight of the unity of the person, and who rejected the term Theotokos, repudiated the decrees both of Ephesus and of Chalcedon, and upon the promulgation of the decrees of Chalcedon formally separated from the church.

No small part of the literature and science of the Mahommedan Arabs came from Nestorian teachers, and Nestorian Christianity spread far and wide through Asia (see Nestorius and Nestorians).

Ismail Agha Shekak, better known as Simko, living between Van and Urmia, murdered the patriarch of the Nestorians, who fled to Persian territory and called upon the Russians to avenge the murder.

The church of the Nestorians, and that of the Monophysites, in their several schools and monasteries, carried on from the 5th to the 8th century the study of the earlier part of the Organon, with almost the same means, purposes and results as were found among the Latin schoolmen of the earlier centuries.

Meanwhile the Monophysites had followed in the steps of the Nestorians, multiplying Syriac versions of the logical and medical science of the Greeks.

It was otherwise with the Nestorians.

Perhaps the Nestorians, who clung to the human aspect of Christ, introduced it about 550.

Rabbu1a perhaps owed his elevation to the see of Edessa (411-435), in the year which produced the oldest dated Syriac MS., to his asceticism, and it was to his time that the sojourn there of the " Man of God " (Alexis) was assigned; but he won from the Nestorians the title of the Tyrant of Edessa.

Modern critics of his work note that he made no attempt to understand the oriental religions which he attacked, and censure him for invoking the aid of the Inquisition and sanctioning persecution of the Nestorians in Malabar.

In 1886, after much careful investigation, he founded the "Archbishop's Mission to the Assyrian Christians," having for its object the instruction and the strengthening from within of the "Nestorian" churches of the East (see Nestorians).

Other attempts during the 16th century to promote union between the Nestorians and Rome proved fruitless, but the Roman Church has never ceased in its efforts to absorb this ancient community.

The history of the Jacobites or Syrian Monophysites who, like the Nestorians, diverged from the Byzantine Church, but in an exactly opposite direction, is told elsewhere (see Jacobite Church, &c.).

The work of these missions is to extend and consolidate that Catholicized and partly Latinized offshoot of the Nestorians known as the Uniat-Chaldean Church (see ante).

The patriarch has jurisdiction over the Uniat Nestorian Church, which numbers, roughly, about 50,000 adherents, and is divided, under the patriarch, into I I dioceses (see Nestorians).