History & overview · every faith gets one
The church that went east — to China, and nearly out of existence.
The East Syriac church of Mesopotamia, which did not receive the Council of Ephesus in 431, was for centuries the widest-spread church on earth — Baghdad to Xi'an — and was reduced by the twentieth century to a few hundred thousand people and a patriarch in exile. Its eucharistic prayer, the Anaphora of Addai and Mari, has no institution narrative and never has had one.
The founding
The church outside the Roman Empire kept the Antiochene theology of Theodore of Mopsuestia and declined to endorse Ephesus's condemnation of Nestorius, whom it never followed but has never agreed to curse. Its missions reached India, Central Asia and Tang China, where the Xi'an stele of 781 records them. After the Simele massacre of 1933 the patriarch was expelled from Iraq; the see returned to Erbil in 2015.
No single founder — The Assyrian Church of the East accreted rather than began.
What it holds
Reality. God's creation, distinct from him at every point — this church guards the distinction between creator and creature closely..
The divine. One God in three persons. In Christ the church confesses two natures and two qnome in one prosopon of sonship — the formula outsiders called Nestorian, which the church itself rejects as a description of its faith..
Death and after. Resurrection and judgment; the dead are remembered in the Friday commemorations of the Hudra..