Introduction

The Author

Alexander Pavlovich Lopukhin was born in the Saratov province in 1852, into an old family of the minor gentry, and rose to become one of the most industrious biblical scholars and religious publicists of late imperial Russia. He passed through the seminary and then the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy, from which he graduated in 1878. His gifts were linguistic and encyclopedic rather than narrowly speculative: he read widely in modern European languages and began contributing to journals while still a student. A formative interlude followed almost at once. In 1879 he was sent as psalm-reader to the Russian embassy church in New York, and the years in America left a lasting mark on him—he returned with a close acquaintance of Western Christianity and its energies, and his master’s dissertation examined the growth of Roman Catholicism in the United States.

The remainder of his life was spent in the service of the Academy and of the Orthodox reading public. From 1883 he taught at the Saint Petersburg Theological Academy, first in comparative religion and then in ancient civil history, a chair he held until his death. He was, above all, an editor and popularizer of the first rank. In 1892 he took charge of Khristianskoe Chtenie (Christian Reading), the Academy’s venerable journal, and also of the Church Herald; he translated and issued the historical works of the English churchman F. W. Farrar; and he conceived the two vast reference projects for which he is still remembered—the Orthodox Theological Encyclopedia and the multi-volume Explanatory Bible that bears his name, both of which he did not live to finish. He died in 1904 and was buried in the Nikolskoe cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in Saint Petersburg.

Across all of this, a consistent interest runs through his work: the life of Christianity beyond the borders of Russia, whether in the churches of the West or in the ancient communities of the East. He had a particular gift for gathering foreign scholarship—English, German, and Latin—and rendering it usable for a Russian readership that could not reach it directly, and he did so with the confidence of a man who had lived abroad and read the sources himself.

Lopukhin wrote as a layman and a professor, and the Church has received him under no title of veneration; his authority is that of a careful, prolific scholar who made the learning of his age accessible to ordinary believers. The present work is a characteristic product of that vocation—a piece of learned journalism, written for a wide audience and occasioned by an event of the moment, in which a specialist’s command of the sources is placed at the service of a pressing practical concern.

The Work: Occasion and Purpose

On 25 March 1898, the feast of the Annunciation, a small delegation of Eastern Syrian Christians—the community long known in the West as Nestorians, and today as the Assyrian Church of the East—was received into the Orthodox Church in the Holy Trinity Cathedral of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra. At its head stood Mar Yonan (Jonah), bishop of Supurgan on the plain of Urmia in north-western Persia, who was admitted with several of his clergy by confession of faith and vesting, the rite presided over by Metropolitan Palladius (Raev) of Saint Petersburg. The day after, the Holy Synod established a Russian ecclesiastical mission at Urmia to accompany the community in its new allegiance. These events belonged to a wider movement, half of the second nineteenth century in the making, by which some of the Assyrian villages along the Persian–Turkish frontier were drawn toward the Russian Church.

The reception took Russian society by surprise. As Lopukhin observes at the outset, the whole matter seemed obscure to the public, “the more so as even the most basic information about the Syro-Chaldean people is lacking.” His purpose is to supply that information. He offers a series of sketches—the word is his own—of the outward and inward life of this people: their history, their mountains, their clergy, their worship, their calendar, and finally their disputed theology, so that Russian readers, and especially Russian pastors, might understand the people whose representatives their Church had just embraced.

The occasion also explains the book’s method, which Lopukhin states plainly in a closing note. His sketches are, by his own account, a Russian digest of an English work: The Catholicos of the East and His People, published in London in 1892 by two Anglican missionaries, Arthur John Maclean and William Henry Browne, who had spent five years among the Assyrians in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s mission. Lopukhin had already reviewed their book in Christian Reading, and had promised his readers a fuller acquaintance with its contents; these sketches redeem that promise. The result is a distinctive act of transmission—first-hand English observation of the mountain Christians of Hakkari and Urmia, refracted through the eyes of a Russian Orthodox scholar and directed to a Russian purpose.

Argument and Structure

The work unfolds in seven sketches that move outward from event to people and inward from custom to doctrine.

The first sketch sets the scene. It opens with the reception of 1898 and then supplies the “brief historical notes” a Russian reader would need: the ancient “Church of the East,” which by tradition traced its founding to the Apostle Thomas with Addai and Mari, once dependent on Antioch, granted its own catholicos at Seleucia-Ctesiphon, siding with Nestorius after the Council of Ephesus in 431, flourishing across Asia as far as China, and then broken by the invasions of Tamerlane and by later schism. Lopukhin distinguishes the two surviving bodies—the followers of the patriarch Mar Shimun and the Uniate “Chaldeans” of Mosul—and confines his study to the first, the mountain and plain Christians of Kurdistan and Persian Azerbaijan.

The second sketch is the most vivid, a portrait of daily life at Kochanes, the patriarch’s remote village in the mountains of Hakkari. Here the Catholicos-Patriarch Mar Shimun holds court in modest dignity, hearing the endless complaints of a people harried by Kurdish raiders and rapacious officials; here too are the learned monk Raban Ionan, the patriarchal jester, and the metropolitan Mar Khanisho, whose household breathes an unusual piety. The third sketch turns to the hierarchy: the three orders and their nine subdivisions ranked against the ranks of the angels, the patriarch’s sonorous titles and real powers, the extraordinary hereditary and Nazirite succession by which bishops are reared from unmarried, meat-abstaining kinsmen, and the poverty of a clergy who must often work the land.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth sketches describe the religious life in detail—the daily round of prayer summoned by the wooden semantron and the fervor of village worshippers; the three ancient liturgies, the leavened bread with its legend of an apostolic relic, and the rites of communion, confession, baptism, and burial; and the calendar of fasts and feasts, with its Ninevite fast, its Theophany, and its distinctive reckoning of the year. Throughout, Lopukhin lingers on what strikes him as patriarchal and biblical in this way of life, a world he presents as a living survival of Christian antiquity.

The seventh and final sketch carries the argument’s weight, for it takes up the theological question that the reception of 1898 had made urgent: in what sense are these people Nestorians? Lopukhin’s answer, following his sources, is careful and generous. The mass of the people, he contends, cannot fairly be convicted of the doctrine that Nestorius taught—that the Son of God and the Son of Mary are two persons. Their oldest liturgies, older than the controversy itself, speak of the one Christ in terms no conscious Nestorian could accept; their difficulty lies rather in a non-technical language ill-fitted to the Greek vocabulary of nature and person, and in their refusal, from long isolation, to accept the councils that fixed those terms. They remain in schism, he grants, so long as they reject the Ecumenical Councils and the title Theotokos; but he holds out real hope of reunion by patient explanation. The sketch closes with a miscellany on the people’s biblicism, their proverbs and riddles, and the character of their Syriac speech, and then with a prayer for Mar Yonan’s mission to his own people.

Theological and Spiritual Significance

The enduring interest of these sketches lies in the irenic spirit with which Lopukhin approaches an ancient breach. The separation of the Church of the East is among the oldest in Christian history. When the Council of Ephesus condemned Nestorius in 431 and affirmed that Mary is rightly called Theotokos because her Son is one person, fully God and fully man, the Christians of the Persian Empire—heirs of the Antiochene theological tradition and cut off by a hostile political frontier—did not accept the verdict, and their estrangement hardened into a lasting identity. The reconciliation that healed part of the rupture in the West, the Formula of Reunion agreed between Cyril of Alexandria and John of Antioch in 433, never reached them.

Lopukhin’s treatment of this history is notable for its restraint. He does not soften the fact of schism, nor does he pretend that the disputed council can simply be set aside; yet he insists that the question be approached “not with a desire to find fault with every ambiguous theological formulation, but in a spirit of love and forbearance.” His governing conviction is that much of the ancient quarrel was a tragedy of language and politics rather than of settled unbelief—that terms were mistranslated, that the acts of Ephesus reached the East only through partisan hands, and that words must be looked beyond to the faith they were meant to carry. The very reunion of 433, in which Cyril accepted formulas he had not used before, becomes for him a model: disagreement resolved by mutual explanation rather than mutual anathema.

There is a further dimension that gives the sketches their warmth. Lopukhin is plainly moved by what he finds in this people—their fervor at daily prayer, their childlike trust under oppression, their reverence for Scripture, and the deep churchliness of a bishop like Mar Khanisho, in whom he sees a demonstration “that religion exercises a deeply ennobling influence even upon the outward circumstances of life.” He presents the Assyrians not as a curiosity but as fellow Christians whose endurance under Islam and Kurdish predation had, in his reading, purified rather than destroyed their faith. That sympathy underwrites the whole argument: it is because he honors the people that he is unwilling to convict them of heresy on the strength of an ambiguous phrase.

This is a work of Christian history and of practical ecclesiology rather than of speculative theology, and its value is partly documentary—it preserves, for a Russian readership and now for an English one, a detailed nineteenth-century picture of a small and endangered Christian people. But its deeper contribution is a disposition: the readiness to assume “the better rather than the worse interpretation” of another Christian community’s inherited language, and to seek unity through understanding. Written on the occasion of one bishop’s reception, it is finally a meditation on how estranged Christians might be drawn together without either party pretending the estrangement had never been.

Reception and Influence

The hopes that animate these pages were only partly realized. The Urmia mission that Lopukhin commends to his readers’ support did real work among the Assyrians of Persia for two decades, and further clergy and communities followed Mar Yonan into Orthodoxy in the years after 1898. But the mission’s history was cut short by catastrophe: the First World War and its aftermath brought massacre and mass flight to the Christians of the region, and the Assyrian community—Orthodox, Uniate, and Protestant alike—was scattered from its ancestral mountains and plains. The larger reunion Lopukhin envisaged did not come to pass, and the community he described survives today, dispersed, as the Assyrian Church of the East. His sketches remain a witness to a moment of hope, and to a way of writing about Christian division that sought reconciliation rather than reproach.

The Text and This Edition

This edition presents a fresh modern English translation of Lopukhin’s Russian text, Katolikos vostoka i ego narod (“The Catholicos of the East and His People”), written and published in 1898 in connection with the reception of Mar Yonan of Supurgan. The English is rendered directly from the Russian in clear, contemporary prose, with the aim of readability for a general audience while preserving the substance and tone of the original.

A word about the text’s unusual pedigree is in order. Lopukhin’s Russian sketches were themselves drawn from an English source—the 1892 account by Maclean and Browne—so that the reader of this edition receives English observation of the Assyrian Christians as it was gathered up, reordered, and given a Russian Orthodox frame by Lopukhin, and then returned once more to English. What this edition offers is therefore not the missionaries’ original book but Lopukhin’s distinct reworking of it: his selection, his emphases, and above all his concern with the prospect of reunion with the Orthodox Church.

The house conventions of this series apply. The author is named as the Church has received him—Alexander Lopukhin, the professor and scholar who wrote the work—with no title of veneration, since he is honored as a learned layman and not as a saint. Those who prepared this English text are credited as translators and never as authors. Chapter divisions and scriptural citations follow the series’ standard style, with numerals given in ordinary Arabic form. Lopukhin’s own scholarly notes, which in the original supported his account with references to the Syriac canonical books and to the Western authorities he consulted, are carried through as part of the text he composed. The reference throughout to the community as “Syro-Chaldeans” or “Nestorians” preserves the usage of Lopukhin’s day; readers should understand it to name the people known today as the Assyrian Church of the East, for whom the label “Nestorian” is now regarded as a historical designation rather than a description they accept.

Suggestions for Reading

A newcomer will find the second sketch, on daily life at Kochanes, the most inviting door into the book, and may read it before returning to the historical outline of the first. Those drawn to the theological heart of the matter should turn to the seventh sketch, where Lopukhin weighs the charge of Nestorianism and states his hope of reunion; it can be read on its own as a compact, generous essay on an old division. The intervening sketches on worship, liturgy, and the calendar reward slower reading as a portrait of a Christian people who kept the forms of a very ancient faith in conditions of great hardship—and it is in that light, rather than as a polemic, that the whole is best received.