My curiosity - and yours too, perhaps - was aroused by the recent visit to the Pope by Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi vice-president. The press called him "a Chaldean Christian". What and who are they?
We sometimes forget, if we concentrate solely on the New Testament, that the gospel spread not only westwards from Palestine, but eastwards as well. Luke in particular gives us a picture in his Gospel of Jesus' gradual progress from Galilee to Jerusalem, and then in Acts, of the church's progressive spread outwards, culminating in Paul's arrival in Rome, the seat of power, the centre of the Empire of the time. The issues Paul faces in his letters are ones posed by the problem of preaching the Good News to a Greek or Roman culture.
But the known world did not stop with the Roman Empire. There were already Jewish settlements in Mesopotamia, Persia, India, as well as Sudan and Ethiopia, and it was natural that the apostles should also look east. It is hard to sift out the truth from the numerous legends about the early churches outside the Roman and Greek world, but early on, there were flourishing churches in Syria, Iraq and India, the Arabian peninsula and Ethiopia. Legend has it that some of these were founded by the apostles Thomas and Thaddeus, but nothing is certain.
In particular, a flourishing church grew up at Edessa, among the headwaters of the Euphrates in modern Turkey, which by the fifth century had become a centre for Christian work and witness throughout the then Persian Empire. At some later stage, the name "Chaldean" grew up to describe them, named after the empire in whose territory lay Ur, Abraham's home city, and Babylon, home of Nebuchadnezzar who destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BC.
Then a problem arose. A local monk, Nestorius, had gone off to study in Antioch, and rose in 428 to become Bishop of Constantinople. The Church at this time was struggling hard to clarify her beliefs - and particularly about the exact extent of Jesus' humanity and his divinity. There were those who said that at his baptism, Jesus had been transformed from man into God, who said his manhood had been swallowed up in his Godhead. This would have meant that Jesus was not really human, and we humans could never really share his death and resurrection. Mainstream Christians (and Nestorius among them) rejected this view, and proposed a form of words (which Nestorius supported), saying that Jesus was "one person with two natures, unconfused, unchangeable, indivisible, inseparable". The key here was the Incarnation. The infant Jesus was God. He did not become God. And if he was God, then Mary was "mother of God" - not a statement about Mary, please, but a statement about Jesus! But this Nestorius did not support.
Impossible, said Nestorius, and for this he was deposed, and at the Council of Chaldedon in 451, he was anathematised - expelled from the church. And as a result, for a thousand years, the church in Edessa and in Mesopotamia was cut off from mainstream Christianity, although its beliefs were effectively those of the rest of the church.
For those thousand years, history took its course. In the seventh century, the area was invaded by the Arabs, bringing Islam. Five hundred years later, the Mongols invaded, and the Ottomans. The church survived all of these, but was pushed into the background.
In 1551, the leader of the church in Iraq called for help from the Roman Catholic church. The Roman church had launched a mission to convert the Muslims in the whole of the Ottoman Empire, which was getting nowhere, and responded with enthusiasm. Internal church politics, and the political situation within the Ottoman Empire before its dissolution in 1918, meant that the Romans met with a mixed reception, and today, there are two "historic" churches in Iraq, the "Chaldeans", who retain their own forms of worship, but since 1830 have been in communion with the Roman Catholic church, and the "Assyrians", who remain independent.
Food for prayer indeed. Prayer firstly for the unity of Christian witness, unity between the Chaldean Patriarch of Babylon, Mar Rafael BeDaweed, and Mar Dinkha IV, Patriarch of the Assyrian Church. Prayer for our own Anglican church, which during the last two centuries has played a mediating role between the two churches. And of course, prayer for the whole people of Iraq, that they may be blessed with peace and justice, no matter what may emerge from the present conflict. We must pray - or else, Christ has died in vain.
HD