Nestorius and His Place in the History of Christian Doctrine. Friedrich 1858-1928 Loofs
this is not a tenable theory I hope to prove in my lectures.
To-day it is my aim merely to show that just at the present time different circumstances have led to the awakening of a fresh interest in Nestorius.
The church of the ancient Roman Empire did not punish its heretics merely by deposition, condemnation, banishment and various deprivations of rights, but, with the purpose of shielding its believers against poisonous influence, it destroyed all heretical writings. No work of Arius, Marcellus, Aetius and Eunomius e.g., not to speak of the earlier heretics, has been preserved in more than fragments consisting of quotations by their opponents. A like fate was purposed for the writings of Nestorius: an edict of the Emperor Theodosius II, dating from the 30th of July 435 ordered them to be burnt[2]. Even the Persian church, about the same time won over to Nestorianism, had to suffer under this edict: only a few works of Nestorius came into its possession for translation into Syriac.
This we learn through Ebed-Jesu, metropolitan of Nisibis (†1318), the most famous theologian of the Nestorians in the middle ages and who has given us the most complete account of the writings of Nestorius. He introduces in his catalogue of Syrian authors[3] the notice about Nestorius with the following words: Nestorius the patriarch wrote many excellent books which the blasphemers (viz. the Antinestorians) have destroyed. As those which evaded destruction he mentions, besides the liturgy of Nestorius, i.e. one of the liturgies used by the Nestorians, which without doubt is wrongly ascribed to Nestorius, five works of the patriarch. The first of these is the book called Tragedy, the second the Book of Heraclides, the third the Letter addressed to Cosmas, the fourth a Book of letters and the fifth a Book of homilies and sermons.
For us the edict of Theodosius against the writings of Nestorius has had a still more important result. Until 1897 nothing was known about the second book mentioned by Ebed-Jesu, i.e. about the Book of Heraclides. Also the Letter addressed to Cosmas mentioned third by Ebed-Jesu had to be counted and is still to be counted as lost[4]. Of the three other works ascribed by Ebed-Jesu to Nestorius we had and still have only fragments—occasional quotations in the works of his enemies and his friends.
Among the hostile writings in which we find such fragments are to be named especially the works of his chief opponent Cyril of Alexandria; then the proceedings of the council of Ephesus; then some works of Marius Mercator, a Latin writer who in the time of Nestorius lived in Constantinople and translated a series of quotations from Nestorius given by Cyril, three letters of Nestorius and also, but with considerable omissions, nine of his sermons; finally the church history of Evagrius (living about 590). The latter gives us[5] an account of two works of Nestorius dating from the time of his exile, one of which must be the Tragedy, while the other could not be identified up to the last ten years, and he inserts in his narration extracts from two interesting letters of the banished heretic. Among the friends who preserved for us fragments of Nestorius the Nestorians of later date played a very unimportant part. Important is a Latin work which has connection with the earliest friends of Nestorius, the so-called Synodicon, known since 1682[6] or, in complete form, since 1873[7], and which is a later adaptation of a work of Bishop Irenaeus of Tyrus, a partisan of Nestorius, which was entitled "Tragedy" like the lost "Tragedy" of Nestorius, upon which perhaps it was based.
The quotations of these enemies and friends represent, as I said, fragments of three books of Nestorius mentioned by Ebed-Jesu, viz. the Book of letters, the Book of sermons and the Tragedy. The first two of these three works of Nestorius need no further explanation. The third, the Tragedy, about which Evagrius and the Synodicon teach us, must have been a polemical work, in which Nestorius, as Evagrius says, defended himself against those who blamed him for having introduced unlawful innovations and for having acted wrongly in demanding the council of Ephesus[8]. The title which the book bears must have been chosen because Nestorius told here the tragedy of his life up to his banishment to Oasis in Egypt.
Fragments of other books of Nestorius not mentioned by Ebed-Jesu were not known to us ten years ago[9].
All the fragments previously known and in addition to them more than 100 new fragments preserved especially by the Syrian-monophysitic literature I collected and edited in 1905 in a volume entitled Nestoriana[10]. It is with pleasure that here in England I mention the collaboration of the learned English scholar Stanley A. Cook, an expert in Syrian language and literature, without whose help I never could have used the Syriac texts in the British Museum. I will not speak long of the book which this help and that of a German scholar then at Halle, Dr. G. , enabled me to compose. Three remarks only shall be made. Firstly: The Syriac fragments gave us knowledge of a book of Nestorius not mentioned by Ebed-Jesu, which was written in the form of a dialogue and which was certainly a comprehensive work, although the number of the fragments handed down to us is very small. The title of this work is The Theopaschites, that is, the man who thinks God had suffered, a title certainly chosen because Nestorius in this dialogue opposed the Cyrillian party, which he accused of holding a doctrine which imagined the God in Christ suffering.
Secondly: The introductory headings in the Syriac fragments of the sermons of Nestorius in combination with a reconstruction of the order of the leaves in the manuscripts used by Marius Mercator and by the council of Ephesus, offered the possibility of arranging the fragments of the sermons of Nestorius in such a manner that more than 30 sermons could be clearly discerned and that not a few of them were recognisable in their essential contents and their characteristics.
Thirdly: By the help of the quotations I succeeded in finding—as did also at almost the same time a Catholic scholar[11] independently of me—the original Greek of one sermon of Nestorius in a sermon preserved in a manuscript at Dresden and printed in 1839 as a work of Chrysostomus. It is a sermon on the high priesthood of Christ in many respects especially characteristic of the teaching of Nestorius.
Thus my Nestoriana gave for the first time an opportunity to survey the remains of the works of Nestorius then accessible. They were the first factor in arousing fresh interest in Nestorius. They inspired, as the author himself says, the writing of a monograph on the christology of Nestorius by a Roman Catholic chaplain, Dr[12].
But the second factor now to be treated is still more important and surely more interesting. Let me give some introductory remarks before treating the subject itself.
Some few heretics of the ancient church were fortunately enabled long after their death to triumph over the condemnation or even destruction which the orthodox church pronounced against their writings.
Of Apollinaris of Laodicea, the heretic whose doctrine was to Nestorius a special cause of offence, we have still not a few writings because the Apollinarists secretly introduced the works of their master into the church literature, inscribing them with the names of orthodox authors of good renown, e.g. Athanasius, Julius of Rome, Gregorius Thaumaturgos. Since these fraudes Apollinaristarum[13], of which as early as the 6th century some church writers had an idea or at least a suspicion[14], were carefully examined, a small collection of works of Apollinaris could be made. Prof. of Jena gave such a collection in his Apollinaris von Laodicea in the year 1904.
Severus of Antioch, the most conspicuous of the Monophysites of the 6th century, continued to be admired in the Syrian monophysite church, although the orthodox church had anathematized him. Hence not an unimportant part of the works of Severus translated into Syriac has been preserved, especially among the Syriac manuscripts of the British Museum. And, besides others[15], your famous countryman E. W. has, to the great advantage of historical science, begun the publication of this material[16].
Pelagius, the well-known western contemporary of Nestorius, whose doctrine Augustine opposed, wrote beside other smaller dogmatical works a large commentary on the Epistles of Saint Paul, the original text of which was held to be lost. An orthodox adaptation only of this work, as was the opinion of ancient and modern scholars,