looked to Edessa for guidance should share Edessa's heresy. All this Persian Church was East Syrian in language and character; her bishops had been brought up on Theodore and his ideas. So, almost as soon as the Nestorians made Edessa their centre, the effect of their teaching reached over the border to the daughter Church. Already the Persian bishops had learned to sympathize with Nestorius and hate Cyril. When, therefore, the empire became impossible for Nestorians, they found a fertile soil waiting for them across the frontier. Bar Ṣaumâ was the man who made Christian Persia Nestorian. He and the other exiles from Edessa poured into the country, hot with indignation against the Roman Government and the Council of Ephesus.
We saw how the School of Nisibis had been formed again at Edessa when the Persians took Nisibis in 363 (p. 75). Now the exact opposite took place. The Nestorian School of Edessa, driven from the empire, was reformed under Bar Ṣaumâ at Nisibis. Bar Ṣaumâ became Bishop of Nisibis, and lost no time in propagating his heresy. He was helped by the attitude of the Government. We have seen that the beginning of persecution in Persia was that the State feared co-religionists and friends of the Romans in its territory. As soon as it discovered that Bar Ṣaumâ and the Nestorians held a form of Christianity which was not that of the enemy, that they had been expelled from the empire just because of this new teaching of theirs, that they were bitterly hostile to Cæsar and Cæsar's religion, naturally, it welcomed the spread of this anti-Roman doctrine among its subject Christians. From now the Persian Government becomes the protector of Nestorians; when the Persian Church turned Nestorian, there was hardly any more persecution. The king at this time was Pīrūz (457–484). Barhebræus[1] tells a story which, though plainly calumnious, represents very well the kind of thing that happened. He says that Bar Ṣaumâ went to the king and said: "Unless the faith of Christians in your lands be different from the faith of
- ↑ For Barhebræus see p. 330. His great work is the Syrian Chronicle (ed. by Bejān: Gregorii Bar Hebræi Chronicon Syriacum, Paris, 1890; the second part only ed. by Abbeloos and Lamy: Chronicon ecclesiasticum, 2 vols., Louvain, 1872–1876). This is a most important source for Nestorian and Jacobite history. We shall often have to refer to it. But his ardent Jacobite feeling makes him sometimes rather unfair to Nestorians.
