Persia and Rome ••• 19Dissident Christian Sects
One Christian group, the Arians, which arose in the early fourth century,
taught that Christ, though divinely inspired and sired, was still a man not
equivalent to God. The Arians' foes argued that if Christ were merely a
man, his crucifixion, death, and resurrection could not redeem human¬
kind. They won the church's acceptance of Christ's divinity at a council
held in Nicaea in 325. Arianism became a heresy (a belief contrary to
church doctrine), and its followers were persecuted as if they had been
traitors to the Roman Empire. Most Christians, though, accepted the di¬
vine trinity: God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Was Christ thus the same
as God? If so, do Christians accept the Gospel stories of his mother's preg¬
nancy, his birth, baptism, mission, and suffering—all essentially human
attributes? The early church fathers, heirs to a rich tradition of Hellenistic
thought, debated these matters. Even for the poor, humble, and unlettered
masses, the nature of Christ was a burning issue, especially in the Middle
East's main Christian centers: Alexandria, Antioch, and Constantinople.
While learned scholars disputed, Christian mobs brawled, rioted, and pil¬
laged over the true nature of the Prince of Peace!
In Antioch grew up a school of theologians called the Nestorians. They
saw Christ as two distinct persons, divine and human, closely and insepa¬
rably joined. A church council at Ephesus condemned this view in 430,
after which the emperor and the Orthodox church tried to suppress Nes-
torianism throughout the Byzantine Empire. Many Nestorians found
refuge in Persia and sent out missionaries to Central Asia, India, China,
and even southern France. Some of their opponents, called Monophysites,
went to the opposite extreme, claiming that Christ contained within his
person a single, wholly divine nature. Though centered in Alexandria, this
Monophysite idea won followers throughout Egypt, Syria, and Armenia
(an independent kingdom in eastern Anatolia). The Egyptian Mono¬
physites called themselves Copts, the Syrian ones Jacobites; their churches
(plus the Armenian one) have survived to the present day. The majority of
Orthodox bishops, meeting at Chalcedon in 451, declared that the Mono¬
physites were heretics, like the Arians and the Nestorians. The Orthodox
church found a compromise formula: Christ the savior was both perfect
God and perfect man. His two natures, though separate, were combined
within the single person of Jesus Christ. Whenever the Byzantine emperor
upheld the Chalcedon formula, the Orthodox bishops would use their po¬
litical power to persecute Egyptians and Syrians who would not recant
their Monophysite (or Nestorian) heresy. This policy turned dissenters
against Constantinople and would later lead to the Arab conquests and the
subjection of Middle Eastern Christianity to Islam.