RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIESassembly of all the clergy and faithfu1.^51 This practice survived well
into the Islamic period. In 729 Mar Prance was consecrated head of
the monastery of Sabhrisho' "in the presence of the metropolitan and
the notables of the land."52 As late as 790 "the faithful of the cities
of the catholicos" (Mada'in) were still involved in the election of the
catholicos and it was still necessary to warn them not to require gifts
from the candidate. 53
The position of Christians under Sasanian rule thus resembles that
of the Jews in the way conflict with Magians over different religious
requirements was offset by official toleration. But the difficulties faced
by Christians were aggravated by their own attempts to replace Ma-
gianism as the religion of the ruling class through conversion, by their
internal quarrels, and by the fact that Christianity was officially as-
sociated with the traditional enemy of the Sasanians: the Byzantine
empire. Apart from the way official toleration brought royal support
for the foundation of churches and monasteries at the beginning of
the reign of Khusraw Parviz, two major consequences of toleration
under the Sasanians established important precedents for Christians
as members of a subject religion. The first was the identification of
the Nestorian Church with the Sasanian state. This meant the adoption
of Sasanian-style hierarchic titles and royal imagery, the regularization
of the Nestorian ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the definition of the
extent of the church to coincide with the borders of the Sasanian
empire. A theory of double authority, ecclesiastical and secular, was
used to sanction church government. The state was expected to enforce
ecclesiastical decisions, while the Nestorians, in turn, were expected
to express their loyalty to the state through prayers for the monarch
and by excommunicating its rebellious Christian subjects.
The second was that toleration was expressed in terms of the ne-
cessity for royal "permission" for the building of churches and mon-
asteries, for Christian burial, for the promulgation of monastic rules,
and for the election of the catholicos. This meant the nomination of
the catholicos by the king, irregular elevations, the involvement of
aristocratic Persian laymen at court in church politics, and the emer-
gence of a conflict within the church that pitted the clergy who favored
canonical elections against the lay aristocrats who favored a situation
in which they could exercise patronage.
51 Chabot, Synodicon, pp. 99, 357.
52 Mingana, Sources syriaques, p. 253.
53 Chabot, Synodicon, pp. 599, 604.