CHAPTER II
THE EAST SYRIAN CHURCH BEFORE NESTORIANISM
The traveller who passes the Turkish-Persian frontier near Lake Urmi, the stranger who goes to delve among the ruins of Nineveh, will perhaps wonder to find in these parts buildings which are plainly Christian churches. Among the unhappy non-Moslem population of these parts he will find families who have nothing to do with either Catholics or Orthodox, but who honour the lifegiving Cross, who have priests and bishops, who are baptized and go to Communion, who in a word are Christians. Who are these people? Some new sect planted in these wilds by Protestant missionaries? No, indeed! Long centuries before Luther nailed up his theses these people worshipped God and Christ as they still do. They were once a mighty and widespread Church. The predecessors of the Patriarch who now rules a few families in Kurdistan ordained bishops for India, for Herat, for Samarkand and distant China. These people are the last tragic remnant of a Church whose history is as glorious as any in Christendom. Their line goes back to those wonderful missions which carried the name of Christ across Asia, to the great army of martyrs whose blood hallowed the soil of Persia, when Shapur II was the Eastern Diocletian, and back behind that to the mythic dawn when Addai and Mari brought the good news from the plains of Galilee, when Abgar sent letters to Jesus the good Physician, and Ḥannân the notary painted a picture of the holy face. These people are the oldest schismatical Church in the world. Thay have stood in their pathetic isolation for fifteen centuries. They are all that is left of the once mighty Nestorian Church.
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