In the middle of the 11th century,
Nestorian physician, 'Ubaidallah Ibn Buhtisu wrote the Arabic book that translates as Book on the Prohibition from Burying the Living, a medical analysis of the intricate state known as apparent death.
A man with unshakable conviction in his own faith and an unyielding grip on Nestorianism, took over the Church of the East in 1976, the crumbling church was at its lowest ebb with just 5 bishops & a handful of churches in its ecclesiastical arsenal, the great
Nestorian mission was disarrayed and on the point of extinction, although it must be said through no fault of its own.
In her study on the
Nestorian Church and its interactions with Muslims, Metselaar aims to portray the influences these two faith communities had on each other.
Bahrain was a centre of
Nestorian Christianity, with records of dioceses and even a monastery in Muharraq.
The people who lived at the monastery probably belonged to the "
Nestorian Church, or Church of the East," it said, adding that the settlement was abandoned after about 750 AD.
Hoping to contribute to the reconciliation, Loon explores Cyril's use of Aristotelian logic, meanings and metaphysics in the trinitarian writings, the first years of the
Nestorian controversy, Contra Nestorium, and other writings from the year 430.
The city is also a historic center for the
Nestorian Christianity of the Assyrians, containing the tombs of several Old Testament prophets such as Jonah, Yunus in Arabic, and Nahum.
In China and south India, by the eighth century, members of the
Nestorian Christian church used a distinctive symbol in which the cross is joined to the lotus, symbol of Buddhist enlightenment.
Augustine, Nemesius of Emesa, the Eastern Church and
Nestorian Christianity on the body, and the influence of Jewish and Islamic thought on the development of the Western medical curriculum.
But
Nestorian missionaries of the seventh and eighth centuries were more successful than the Catholic ones who arrived much later, in large part because they did not expose or venerate crucifixion images.
Assyrian
Nestorian and Egyptian Monophysite communities, for example, were deemed "heterodox" by the church of Constantinople and were therefore subject to persecution.
(Editor's note: The Catholic equivalent of the Holy Catholic Apostolic Assyrian Church of the East, a
Nestorian Church, is the Chaldean Church.