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tity; so did Rome’s growing doctrinal intolerance, especially the expulsion
of the so- called School of the Persians from Edessa c. 489. The members of
this School followed the one- time Patriarch of Constantinople Nestorius
(d. 451) and his (alleged) doctrine that the incarnate Christ existed “in” two
separate natures, divine and human, so that God might not be said to have
died on the cross, or Mary to be “Mother of God.”^21 What eventually be-
came the East Roman Church’s official view was enunciated at the Council
of Chalcedon in 451: Christ as perfect God inseparably united in one per-
son to perfect man, like us in everything except our sin. With this “dyo-
physite” (two- nature) line the arch- heretic Nestorius declared himself rea-
sonably content, to the delight of Chalcedon’s miaphysite or henophysite (as
contemporary scholarship calls them) opponents. Miaphysites preached one
incarnate nature of the Word, “out of two natures” but not “in two natures,”
aspiring to underline the real unity of Christ’s person but in so doing obscur-
ing, so their critics felt, Christ’s full humanity. In Iran, both “Nestorian”^22 or
Church of the East Christians, and miaphysite communities, flourished
mightily. By 635 a Church of the East mission had reached the court of the
emperor of China,^23 and this branch of Christianity was to remain active in
China until the mid- ninth century. It was reintroduced by the Mongols for
a time in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In Central Asia it enjoyed
a more continuous history, but succumbed to Islam in the fourteenth
c entur y.^24
Despite its eastward extent and creativity, the Syriac world is treated as an
appendix to mainstream histories of Christianity, and the story as conven-
tionally told (following Eusebius’s bad example) is about the Greek and Latin
traditions of the West.^25 In general—by secular as well as ecclesiastical histo-
rians, but with recent exceptions noted at the end of the previous chapter—it
is only with the rise of Islam that the Mediterranean paradigm is finally felt
to buckle and break; or rather, at this point ancient historians switch off so as
21 God also had to endure “wives” and even “mothers- in- law” (those whose daughters became
nuns): Jerome, letters [ed. and tr. (French) J. Labourt (Paris 1949–63)] 22.16, 20. For a brief, lucid expla-
nation of the issues at stake at Chalcedon, see H. Chadwick, “Philoponus the Christian theologian,” in R.
Sorabji (ed.), Philoponus and the rejection of Aristotelian science (London 2010^2 ) 86–87.
22 On the misnomer, see al- Masʿūdī, Meadows of gold (Murūj al- dhahab) [ed. and tr. (French) C.
Barbier de Meynard and J.- B. Pavet de Courteille (Paris 1861–77); revised C. Pellat (Beirut 1966–79,
text; 1962–, translation)] 749.
23 P. Pelliot (ed. A. Forte), L’inscription nestorienne de Si- ngan- fou (Kyoto 1996).
24 H.- J. Klimkeit, Die Seidenstrasse (Cologne 1990^2 ) 83–87; S. N. C. Lieu, Manichaeism in the
later Roman Empire and medieval China (Tübingen 1992^2 ) 232–33, 261; L. Tang, A study of the history
of Nestorian Christianity in China and its literature in Chinese (Frankfurt 2004^2 ). On the Church of the
East generally, see C. Baumer, The Church of the East (London 2006); J. Walker, “From Nisibis to Xi’an:
The Church of the East in late antique Eurasia,” in Johnson (ed.), Late Antiquity [1:12] 994–1052.
25 A. y. Reed, “Beyond the Land of Nod: Syriac images of Asia and the historiography of “the
West,”” History of religions 49 (2009) 48–87.