NESTORIANISM is a doctrinal position on the nature of Jesus Christ. In its extreme form the doctrine has been condemned by Christian councils, but the ideas associated with Nestorianism have come to represent one of the two main traditions of Christological thought in Christianity and have been ably defended and articulated by successive generations of Christian thinkers. The name goes back to Nestorius, a patriarch of Constantinople in the early fifth century who was deposed at the Council of Ephesus in 431 and exiled to Egypt in 436. Nestorius was not, however, an original thinker, and the theological views that came to be associated with his name had arisen late in the fourth century among Christian thinkers in eastern Asia Minor and Syria (in the vicinity of ancient Antioch), notably Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia. The distinctive features of Nestorianism can be made clear by contrasting it with another tradition of thought associated with the city of Alexandria in Egypt.
After the councils of Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381), the majority of Christians affirmed that Christ was fully God and was one with God the Father, creator of the world. The question then arose of the relation between this divine Son of God, the eternal Logos, and the human person Jesus of Nazareth who lived in the first century and is portrayed in the Gospels of the New Testament. The Alexandrian theologians, led by Cyril of Alexandria (d. 444), taught that Jesus Christ was the eternal Logos under the conditions of humanity. All the actions predicated of Jesus (e.g., human birth, growth in wisdom, suffering, and death) were predicated of the divine Logos as well. The Antiochene theologians (the forerunners of Nestorianism) believed that Jesus Christ was the result of a union between the divine Son of God and the man Jesus. They explained this union by analogy with the Jewish prophets, outstanding men on whom the spirit of God descended, except that in the case of Christ, God indwelt as in a Son, and the union between God and the Son was inseparable and perfect.
In the early fifth century these two ways of thinking, Alexandrian and Antiochene, clashed over the issue of whether Mary was theotokos, the one who gave birth to God, or christotokos, the bearer of Christ. After Nestorius became bishop of Constantinople, one of his priests, without Nestorius's objection, criticized the concept of theotokos as theologically erroneous. He urged the use of the term christotokos, which conformed to the Antiochene way of thinking of Mary as having given birth to the man Jesus, not to the eternal son of God. The term theotokos, however, had begun to be used by Christians and had the sanction of recent tradition. To Cyril of Alexandria, as well as to the bishop of Rome, denial of the concept of theotokos implied that Mary was not the Mother of God, and hence that God had not become human in the birth of Jesus Christ and that Mary was simply the mother of an exceptional man. Nestorius appeared to teach that there were two persons in Christ, the man Jesus and the divine Son of God. A flurry of theological polemics and political maneuvering ensued. In 430 Celestine, bishop of Rome, condemned Nestorius, and a year later Cyril presided over the Council of Ephesus, which also anathematized him. Emperor Theodosius supported the decision.
Nestorius's writings survive only in fragments, except for an obscure work, Bazaar of Heracleides, discovered in 1895 in a Syriac translation from the original Greek. Nestorius wrote the Bazaar some years after the controversy as a defense against the charges of his opponents.
Nestorianism, however, is not to be identified with the teaching of Nestorius, though he is venerated by the Nestorian church (i.e., the church of eastern Syria and Persia). Nestorius's supporters thought that their views were vindicated by the Council of Chalcedon in 451. During the course of the fifth century, they constituted themselves as an independent Christian body, with a school in Edessa under the leadership of Ibas, bishop of Edessa (435–457) and an ecclesiastical center and see of the patriarch (who is called catholicos) at Seleucia-Ctesiphon on the Tigris River. A small body of Nestorians has survived into modern times.
Under the leadership of distinguished theologians such as Babai the Great (d. 628), the Nestorians forged an alternative to the way of thinking about Christ that had become normative for most Christians in the East and West. They believed that the dominance of the Alexandrian tradition, with its stress on Christ's unity with God, jeopardized the integrity of his human nature. One of their favorite biblical texts was Luke 2:52, "Jesus increased in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man," a passage that is extremely difficult to interpret if one does not allow genuine human growth in Jesus. Other texts came from passages in Hebrews (2:10, 3:1–2) that suggest that Jesus had become perfect by what he had accomplished as a human being. Long after the ancient disputes a systematic presentation of Nestorian theology was written by Abdisa (d. 1318), metropolitan of Nisibis, in The Book of the Pearl.
