Christians in the Sasanian Empire

Christians were one of the largest religious minorities in the Sasanian Empire, especially in Mesopotamia and Khuzestan. Their history under Persian rule swung between persecution, worst under Shapur II from about 340 CE, and official recognition, marked by the Synod of Seleucia-Ctesiphon in 410. Out of these centuries grew the Church of the East, an independent church that later carried Christianity from Iran across Asia to India and China.

Beginnings

Christianity reached Mesopotamia early, through the Aramaic-speaking towns of the upper Tigris and Euphrates and the caravan city of Edessa. By the time the Sasanians took power in 224 there were Christian communities in Adiabene and southern Mesopotamia, probably with bishops. Later church chronicles give long lists of early bishops, but historians treat the details with caution.

The Sasanian kings themselves added to the Christian population. Shapur I’s campaigns in Syria and Asia Minor brought tens of thousands of Roman captives to Iran (see Shapur I). Many were Christians, including the bishop of Antioch, Demetrianus, according to later tradition. They were settled in Khuzestan, Fars and Parthia, and their churches, using Greek alongside Syriac, survived for centuries. Kartir’s late third-century inscriptions list two words for Christians, nasra and kristiyan, which may reflect these two communities, native and deported. See Kartir and the Zoroastrian Church.

The great persecution under Shapur II

Everything changed when Constantine the Great made Christianity the favoured religion of the Roman Empire in the early fourth century. Rome was Iran’s great enemy, and Persian Christians now shared the emperor’s faith. A letter attributed to Constantine, preserved by the church historian Eusebius, urged Shapur II to protect the Christians in his realm, which can only have increased Persian suspicion.

When war with Rome began in 337, Shapur II demanded a double tax from Christians to pay for it. According to the Syriac Acts of the Persian Martyrs, Simeon bar Sabba’e, bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, refused to collect it from his poor congregations, was arrested and executed together with many clergy, traditionally on Good Friday of 344 (some sources give 341). A wave of arrests and executions followed, with intervals, for decades. The Greek historian Sozomen, writing in the fifth century, says the names of about 16,000 martyrs were known, a figure most historians think is exaggerated.

The Acts, written in Syriac, are a large body of martyr stories that include bishops, monks, nuns and converts from noble Persian families. They are religious literature, not court records, but they give vivid detail about Sasanian law, the role of Zoroastrian priests and the treatment of apostates. Converting from Zoroastrianism to Christianity was treated as a crime throughout the Sasanian period. For the king’s wider reign, see Shapur II.

The Synod of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, 410

Under Yazdegerd I (399–420), relations improved sharply. The king ended the persecution and allowed Christians to rebuild churches and bury their dead openly. Christian writers praised him as a new Cyrus; Zoroastrian and later Persian tradition called him “the sinner”. His reign is covered on Yazdegerd I.

In 410 the bishops of the empire met at Seleucia-Ctesiphon with the king’s permission, under the leadership of the bishop Isaac and Marutha, bishop of Maypherqat (Martyropolis), who had come as an envoy from the Roman emperor. The synod adopted the Nicene Creed, organised the church into provinces under metropolitan bishops, set rules for the election of bishops and recognised the bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon as the head of the whole church, later called the catholicos. The acts of the synod record that the decisions were made under the protection of the king of kings, whose officials enforced them. The Christian community had become a recognised institution of the Sasanian state.

A separate church

Persecution returned at the end of Yazdegerd’s reign, after a priest in Khuzestan destroyed a fire temple, and continued under Bahram V and Yazdegerd II. In Armenia, Christian resistance led to the Battle of Avarayr in 451. But the Church in Iran also moved steadily towards independence from the churches of the Roman Empire.

• In 424 the Synod of Dadisho declared that the catholicos could not be judged by the “Western fathers”, the bishops of the Roman Empire.
• After the Council of Chalcedon (451) divided Roman Christianity, the church in Iran adopted the theology of Theodore of Mopsuestia, which its opponents called “Nestorian”, at synods held in 484 at Bet Lapat (Gondishapur) under bishop Barsauma of Nisibis and in 486 at Seleucia-Ctesiphon.
• When the Roman emperor Zeno closed the theological school at Edessa in 489, its teachers moved to Nisibis, in Persian territory. The School of Nisibis became the intellectual centre of the Church of the East.

Because its theology differed from that of Constantinople, the Church of the East could present itself to the Sasanian kings as clearly not a Roman church. That helped its position at court. Not all Christians in Iran joined it, however. In the sixth century, a rival miaphysite church, later known as the Syriac Orthodox Church, gained followers, especially in northern Mesopotamia, where the monastery of Mar Mattai near Mosul became one of its centres.

Christians at the Sasanian court

By the sixth century Christians served as doctors, scribes, envoys and administrators. Khosrow I (531–579) clashed with and exiled the catholicos Mar Aba, a convert from Zoroastrianism, yet also relied on Christian bishops as diplomats. Under Khosrow II (590–628) the influence of Christians reached its height. His favourite wife, Shirin, was a Christian, and his physician Gabriel of Sinjar was a leading figure in church politics. See Shirin: Queen and Legend.

Christian monks and merchants also travelled east. Bishops were appointed in Merv and Herat, and missions reached Central Asia, India and, after the fall of the Sasanians, China, where a stele erected at Xi’an in 781 records the arrival of the “Luminous Religion” from Persia.

How historians see it

Older histories often painted the Sasanian state as fanatically Zoroastrian and constantly persecuting. Recent scholarship gives a more mixed picture. Persecution was real and sometimes brutal, but it was usually linked to war with Rome, to cases of apostasy from Zoroastrianism or to attacks on fire temples, rather than to a steady policy. For long periods Christians lived, worshipped and held office in the empire. The Church of the East was, in a real sense, a Persian church. For Christians in Iran from the Islamic period to today, see Christians of Iran.