Nestorius, who lived from around 386 to 451 AD1 in the was the Patriarch of Constantinople

The Nestorian Schism occured after the 3rd Ecumenical Council of Ephesus >condemned Nestorius for his views on a theological point2 .

I'm in no position to judge the theological merits of the case, but to me, it seems more than a coincidence that the break occured along the lines it did.3 CONTRA: It was only a couple hundred years later that the Syriac speaking Christians of the Eastern Roman Empire were conquered.

Footnotes

2. Namely, that Jesus of the Christian religion existed both as a person and as divine, and that only the person died. The particular relation between the divine and human nature of this particular religious figure is a controversy which extended for centuries, and which, combined with the theological relationship between Jesus the Nazarene and the rest of the godhead have been the particular points of innumerable Christian schisms.back


3.It could have happened that the greatest defender of one position, Nestorius himself for example, undoubtledly spoke Syriac, being born and raised in Syria, but also Greek, as it was the native language of Istanbul at that timeback


1.I think the dating system that should be used, if one had to choose an arbitrary way to make the final decision, is to calculate something like "whose system goes back the furthest without error" since I don't believe there is a super-majority system.back
Seven great ecumenical councils: Nicea, Constantinople, Ephesus, Chalcedon

CONTRA:

ME 500s map QUESTION: Perhaps Nestorius actually spoke Greek better than Syriac, or made his arguments in Greek in the first place? Isn't this more of a "home town boy" issue (being born and educated in Antioch, Syriac speaking area(?)) than anything linguistic? ANSWER: certainly we aren't going to argue that geographical location of a person, whether mountain or meadow, has ought to do with which side of a theological debate someone is on. Perhaps, though, because the argument was made by a local hero, people ignored the debate, and simply sided with the home team. What percentage spoke Syriac, Pahlavi, Parthian or Greek, anyway? And here the relevant populations are Christian, rather than Zoroastrianism. What was literacy like? One argument against the hometown boy rule was that the citizens of Antioch did not prevent the Romans from closing out the school of Nestorius's teacher, Theodore of Mpsuestia. The school [School of Nisibis] moved eastward, to modern Iran, then the Sassanid Empire. It was politically advantageous for the Sassanids, as far as their antagonistic relations with the Eastern Roman Empire were concerned, to harbor the Nestorians. Not much of a counter-argument, I admit.