Read an excerpt from “Against All Odds: The Assyrian Church” below, then read the full story.
Last November, Father James Moynihan and I attended the 25th anniversary of a parish in Yonkers, N.Y. As with any church function, many families had taken tables for the festival and others brought trays of steaming food while the band tuned its instruments and tested the loud speakers.
Typical in some ways, but in other ways this celebration was quite different. Once the speeches ended and the music began, I was transported back to the seventh century B.C., when the paths of the Assyrians, the inhabitants of ancient Babylon and Ninevah, crossed those of the Israelites. The parishioners are members of Mar Mari parish of the Assyrian Church of the East – “Nestorians” we used to call them.
Before the dancing began, Mar Aprim, the community’s bishop – (Mar means “one who is sent” in Aramaic) – spoke to the congregation about their patron, who in Assyrian tradition was one of the 72 disciples referred to in the Gospel of St. Luke (Chapter 10). Mar Aprim spoke of how their parish church contained a stone from one of the ancient, now destroyed, churches of the early East Syrian church; a body that flowered in the Persian Empire (modern Iran and Iraq).
Modern scholarship reveals that by the middle of the second century, A.D., the Assyrian Church developed directly from the Judeo-Christian Church of Jerusalem. The tensions of war between the Byzantine and Persian Empires in the fourth century led the Assyrians to adopt a christology that varied from both Rome and Constantinople. The Assyrians also asserted their independence from the bishop of Rome and the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople.
Isolated from the churches in the West, and a minority in the Zoroastrian Persian Empire, the Assyrian Church focused its missionary endeavors in the East.