[
    {
        "id": 204392,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1962",
        "page_number": 24,
        "title": "RAS-1962",
        "content_text": "NESTORIAN CROSSES\n\n15\n\nevangelized the West. To this day there are Churches of St. Thomas on the Malabar coast of India, claiming the Apostle Thomas as their founder. Whether or not the evidence is sufficient for this claim, it certainly indicates a very ancient date for the origin of these Churches of the East.\n\nAs the branch of the Church that moved westwards into Europe wrote its Scriptures in colloquial Greek—the lingua franca of the Roman Empire, so the branch of the Church that moved eastwards first with Antioch then Edessa as its centre, used Syriac as its common language; it was at Edessa that its Scriptures were translated into Syriac, and it was at Edessa that its scholarship developed and a School of Theology was founded. To this day Syriac is the liturgical language of the ancient Churches of South India,\n\nDuring the fourth century a Theological controversy arose in the Eastern provinces of the Roman Empire concerning the manner in which the Divine and the Human natures were related in Jesus Christ. The leadership of the thought of the Church at the time was with the Church of Alexandria in Egypt, where great emphasis was laid upon the Divine nature of Christ. In the province of Syria the Christian leaders feared lest in the current trend of thought the Humanity of Jesus should not be sufficiently recognized. A presbyter in the Church at Antioch, Nestorius, who was soon afterwards made Patriarch of Constantinople—the highest position in the Eastern Church—began to preach the doctrine of two complete natures—the Human and the Divine—existing side by side in the person of Jesus Christ. This doctrine which became known as 'Nestorianism' was rejected by an irregular Council of the Church held at Ephesus in A.D. 431, and Nestorius was deposed and driven into exile. His followers were persecuted and fled eastwards, first to Edessa the headquarters of Syrian Christianity, beyond the Euphrates, then across the frontier to Nisibis in Persia, where the scholars gathered and where a Theological School essentially Nestorian in character was established. The Nestorian doctrine, partly perhaps because Persia was at enmity with Rome, found favour with the Persian Churches.\n\n+\n\n嗡\n\n+ Adency, The Greek and Eastern Churches, T. & T. Clark, 1908, p. 461. \"Ibid., p. 480.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 212125,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1990",
        "page_number": 67,
        "title": "RAS-1990",
        "content_text": "THE 'SYRIAN BRILLIANT TEACHING’\n\nDAVID WILMSHURST\n\nIntroduction\n\nFew Christians nowadays outside the Middle East are familiar with the name, let alone the history, of the Nestorian church of Persia, yet between the ninth and fourteenth centuries it was in some respects perhaps the largest Christian church in the world, with bishoprics stretching from the Mediterranean right across Asia to China. The church took its name from Nestorius, who became archbishop of Constantinople in 428 and was deposed not long afterwards for holding heretical views on the nature of Christ. Nestorius placed great stress on the human nature of Jesus, and tried to discourage the use in the churches under his jurisdiction of the title Theotokos, 'mother of God', a term which had long been applied to the Virgin Mary. To his enemies, he appeared to be denying the divinity of Christ, and regarding him as a mere man who had been adopted by God as his son, though it is now clear that his views were considerably closer to the orthodox position than he was given credit for at the time. A heated controversy ensued, and both sides in the dispute supported their arguments with bribery and intimidation. The opposition to Nestorius was led by Cyril, archbishop of Alexandria, who was motivated partly by a genuine distaste for his opponent's theology and partly by jealousy of his ecclesiastical status. Cyril finally procured the deposition and banishment of Nestorius at the Council of Ephesus in 431.\n\nIn the next century and a half the Nestorian heresy was stamped out within the territories of the Roman empire, and its adherents fled to neighbouring Persia. Although the state religion of Sassanian Persia was Zoroastrianism, Christianity had firmly established itself in the western provinces of the Persian empire, particularly among the mainly Syrian population of northern Mesopotamia and in Khuzistan and Fars, and Persia's Christian minority by and large sympathised with the theological position which Nestorius had taken. The influx of Christian refugees from the Roman empire strengthened the native Persian church, and after the Persian empire was conquered by the Moslem Arabs in the seventh century the Nestorian church enjoyed a period of rapid expansion. Syrian and Persian Christians were tolerated by their Moslem rulers and organised into a melet, or official minority",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299",
        "rank": 0
    }
]