This article is the last part of a series. We suggest you read them in order.
By Robert Petrovich
When therefore I had seen that these things were brought to pass by God, would you have wished that I should be silent and hide such a dispensation of God as all this? . . . The prophets of God, who had been cursed as lying prophets by lying prophets . . . would not have been distinguished, unless they had consented to be cursed by lying prophets for the sake of God.
– from The Bazaar of Heracleides
Mar Dinkha IV (2008)
The entire dramatic action of the Nestorian controversy played out over fifteen centuries on several continents and reached an inglorious conclusion as a footnote of 1994. In that year, the modern representative of the Syriac Church, Mar Dinkha IV, Patriarch of the Church of the East, signs the “Common Christological Declaration” with Pope John Paul II of the Roman Church. The declaration does not mention Nestorius by name but does vindicate the term Christotokos by both churches. In addition, the Holy Synod of the Church of the East unilaterally decides to remove from its liturgical books and official publications all negative references to Cyril, who had been canonized a saint by the Western Church.
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The writings of Nestorius, originally very numerous, were condemned to be burned by imperial edict in 435. The few works of Nestorius that are extant are the product of or derived from his engagement in the ecclesiastical polemics of 428–431: fragments of letters preserved among the works of those to whom they were written, some sermons collected in Latin translation by an African merchant doing business in Constantinople during the time of the dispute, a liturgy attributed to him that is still used in the Church of the East for five days of the year, and a pseudonymous and autobiographical account of the whole difficulty supposed to have been written by him (The Bazaar of Heracleides) and which was preserved in a single mutilated manuscript of styleless Syriac translation for several hundred years in a monastery in the Euphrates valley. In the fourteenth century, in addition to these, a collection of letters and a collection of homilies were still extant. They have since been destroyed in wars and natural catastrophes. The writings of the teacher of Nestorius have suffered a similar fate. Theodore of Mopsuestia, hailed as a great orthodox biblical scholar and theologian during his lifetime, was condemned as a heretic more than one hundred years after his death (at the fifth general council under the influence of Emperor Justinian in 553) because he was perceived to be a precursor of the heresy of Nestorius. From that time, even his name disappears in the West; and of the Syriac translations of his work, which once filled forty-one tomes, today only one remains.
Robert Petrovich
October 2005
This series was previously published in The Community Communique