Marco Polo noted the presence of Nestorians throughout China. Who were these people and what did they believe?
Nestorian Christians are said by Marco Polo among others to have been present in quite large numbers in southern China and they were also to be found wherever international merchant communities were gathered. Recent archaeology has also revealed that Nestorian Christians were more populous in some parts of Tang China than Buddhists. Who were these people and what did they believe?
The Nestorians considered themselves to be part of the Assyrian Church of the East, which was an Orthodox Church known in India as the Chaldean Syrian Church of the East. Christians belonging to this church, which is said to have been founded by the Apostle St Thomas, were spread from the church’s home in Babylon across central Asia and into India and China. Their beliefs differed from western Christians in terms of the divine nature of Jesus Christ and other doctrinal issues that were then considered important. Other churches which also developed in that era included the Armenian Apostolic Church, the Coptic Orthodox Church, the (Assyrian) Church of the East and the Syrian Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch. These churches developed their own canon law and grew further apart after the Arab conquests on the one hand protected their independence while leading to their isolation. Understanding of these different forms of Christianity has been almost uniformly very low in western countries.
The presence of Nestorians and their success in converting tribes such as the Keraits was the inspiration for the belief in western Europe that a Christian King (Prester John) ruled somewhere in Central Asia and would one day send huge armies to assist in capturing Jerusalem. When news of the imminent arrival of the armies of Genghis Khan (Chinggis Khan) in Europe was received by the courts of the continent, many people comforted themselves that it was in truth the arrival of Prester John and his hordes who were arriving with a view to smiting the Muslim states which were then so powerful and influential. They were to be disappointed in this hope. It also betrayed the ignorance of the west, since it was the Caliphate that undertook to protect the Church of the East after the Arab conquest of Persia.
Eventually, in the C16th, Portuguese missionaries to the Malabar Coast, which was then one of the strongholds of the followers of St Thomas, put aside their initial protestations of friendship to persecute the people involved until they accepted western forms of dogma. This signaled the effective end of Nestorianism.
