the names of no less than one hundred and fifty authors, it will be seen over how wide a range of literature their researches extended. Though religion was evidently the main spring and end of almost all their writings, still they do not appear to have confined themselves to what is strictly called Divinity, but to have carried their investigations into all the known sciences. The catalogue referred to makes us acquainted with at least twenty commentators on the whole or parts of the Bible, many ritualists, controversialists, canonists, ecclesiastical and profane historians, more than one hundred poets, several lexicographers and grammarians, logicians, writers on natural philosophy, metaphysics, geography, and astronomy, besides many other learned essayists on miscellaneous subjects.
Nor did the Nestorians confine the workings of their vigorous minds to compositions in their own language; but carried their investigations into the wide field of Greek ecclesiastical and profane literature. I have before me a short chronological table, written some centuries ago, in which the following notice of the famous siege of Troy is recorded. "During the time of Elon, of Zabulon, the great city of Ilion was destroyed, after a siege of twelve years. This war arose on account of Helen the wife of king Menelaus, who had been carried away by Paris, the son of Priam, king of Ilion. Menelaus slew Paris, and took back his wife after she had borne three children to Paris." The list of Mar Abd Yeshua contains the names of forty western writers, among which are some of the most celebrated theologians of the Greek or Eastern Church; and the same respectable authority mentions several Syriac versions and expositions of Aristotle, besides the translation of the Septuagint, the voluminous works of Theodore of Mopsuestia, and other Greek authors, by Nestorian scholars.[1]
That the learning of the Greeks was eagerly sought after, and the study of their language highly cultivated by the early Nestorians, is placed beyond dispute by the fact that several writers from among them are mentioned as having held controversies
- ↑ One of the most learned ecclesiastics at Mosul maintains, that the entire chain of western writers mentioned by Mar Abd Yeshua existed in Syriac. This does not positively appear from the catalogue itself, although there is some ground for believing the inference to be correct.
