Description and Significance of the Nestorian Stele, “A Monument Commemorating the Propagation of the Da Qin Luminous Religion in the Middle Kingdom” (大秦景教流行中國碑)
The limestone monument known in the West as the Nestorian Stele, Tablet, or Monument is arguably one of the most important documents in the history of Christianity and East-West relations. This engraved stone monument, now housed in the Forest of Steles Museum (西安碑 林博物館) in Xi’an (西安), the capital city of Shaanxi Province in central-northwestern China, eulogizes the history of the Assyrian Church of the East in China between 635 C.E., the year this branch of Christianity arrived there, and 781 C.E., the year the stele was erected. The jingjiaobei(景教碑), as the stele...
Read MoreThe Incarnation of the Word and the deification of man according to St Isaac of Nineveh – Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev
The Incarnation of the Word of God, which stands at the centre of the New Testament message, is one of the key themes of St Isaac of Nineveh, a Syrian mystical writer of the seventh century. Isaac belonged to the Church of the East, commonly known as ‘Nestorian’, which, however, had little to do with Nestorius, a fifth-century heretical patriarch of Constantinople. The Church of the East used the Syriac language and considered Theodore of Mopsuestia (fourth century) as its main theological and spiritual authority. The translation of Theodore’s works into Syriac was made in the fifth...
Read MoreGREEK ASTRONOMY AND ITS DEBT TO THE BABYLONIANS* By LEONARD W.CLARKE
SYNOPSIS ‘Recent studies of Babylonian sources have shown that we must revise former estimates of the extent to which the Greeks were indebted for the details of their astronomy to the Babylonians; the debt proves to have been much greater than had been imagined, and further researches may prove it to have been greater still.’ So wrote Sir Thomas Heath in 1932; in the previous year, Professor Filon had written, ‘It is gradually beginning to be realized that many of the achievements of Greek culture in the fields of astronomy and mathematics did not spring, fully armed, from the...
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