§ 2. THE FOUNDATION OF THE CHURCH
The Christian Church was a thing that the Sassanids found existing when they established themselves in the country, and one that was already widely spread, and organized on apostolic lines. This fact was of considerable importance for the future relations of the two, for the struggle would have been very hard before the Church could have established herself, de novo, in a Zoroastrian kingdom. The difficulty would have been comparable to that found in the spreading of Christianity in Fez or Morocco at the present time. As it existed, however, prior to the rise of the dynasty, it was, so to speak, taken over by it, as a part of the new empire; and when the relations between the two came to be formalized, it was on the assumption that Christianity had as much a legal right to exist in the Sassanid Empire, as it has in a Moslem kingdom like the Ottoman Empire of to-day. In each case, this qualified toleration was accorded to it on the same ground, viz. that the Christian religion was one that the dominant faith found existing at the time when it conquered the country.
The Church was widely spread; it extended from the Mountains of Kurdistan (for this last refuge of the descendants of these Christians was apparently not then evangelized) to the Persian Gulf, and was governed by "more than twenty bishops,"[1] whose sees were distributed over all the country named. It is to be noted, however, that though the bishoprics were thus widely scattered, there was as yet no bishop in the capital city, Seleucia-Ctesiphon, a fact that was to have some importance in the history of the body. Nisibis,
- ↑ Mshikha-Zca, Life of Khiran.
