troversy, it was the peace of the Empire that he saw endangered, not the vital truth of Christianity; and the council was summoned to guard the first, by determining the second. Under these circumstances, it was natural that he should not summon bishops from outside the empire to settle a domestic matter. The Emperor was, of course, aware of the existence of the Church in Persia, and took an interest (too much interest, perhaps) in its fortunes; but in the matter of the council he seems to have regarded it as outside his purview. So the synod met, and the "Easterns" were not represented in it.
A few years elapsed, and the rise of the great persecution protected them (at a frightful cost) from the weary controversy that followed.
It is a fact, however, that one of the greatest of "Assyrian" saints, and the holder of one of the most important metropolitical sees of later "Assyrian" history, was undoubtedly present at Nicæa. James of Nisibis certainly, and Ephraim Syrus his deacon probably, were at the council; but they were there as representatives, not of a see in the Persian Empire, but of one in the Roman. It was not until 363 that Nisibis, hitherto the bulwark of the Roman frontier, was abandoned by Jovian to Persia, and a throne that had hitherto been (if in any patriarchate) in that of Antioch, fell naturally under that of Seleucia-Ctesiphon.[1]
- ↑ A John "of Persia" occurs in some lists of Nicene signatories, but this is probably a mis-reading for Perrha. Persia was never the name of a see in the Assyrian Church, though the province of "Fars" formed the jurisdiction of a metropolitan in later days. The legend referred to by Bar-Hebræus (Primates Orientis, Vita Papæ), that either Papa or Shimun attended Nicæa, we reject without hesitation as the figment of a latter day, when Assyrians had come to believe that "so great a throne as ours must have had a representative at so great a council." See Labourt, p. 32, note.
