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The Great Division took place during the first half of the sixth century, and it changed Christianity from being a complex religious movement into something more like a mosaic consisting of three separate and distinct ecclesiastical tiles. One of those tiles was the Roman Imperial Church, which continued to support the conclusions of the Council of Chalcedon. A second tile took shape in the Persian Empire, where the Church of the East emerged as a newly cohesive network of non-Roman congregations and monasteries. In between these two antagonistic empire-related Christian organizations, a third ecclesiastical coalition arose in Syria and Egypt, forming the third tile of Christianity’s new mosaic. This third group is known as the Miaphysite tradition or Oriental Orthodoxy.

The Great Division is a watershed moment in the history of Christianity, not only because of the three new traditions that were created, but also because these three traditions soon came to dominate the entire Christian movement. Various independent, local Christian groups that had previously gone their own ways now felt compelled to choose sides. Christians in Georgia and Ireland, for example, chose to align with the Chalcedonian tradition, while Christians in Armenia and Ethiopia joined the Miaphysite movement. The consolidation of Christianity into three large and distinct communities, each nurturing its own tradition, permanently reshaped Christianity, and the space for smaller alternative visions of Christianity shrank to almost nothing (see Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Geographic locations of the three traditions created by the Great Division.

The flashpoint for the Great Division was Christology; the three groups held decidedly different views about who Jesus was and about the purpose of his life and death. Chalcedonians said that the human and divine natures were connected, but neither merged nor confused, in the one person of Christ. Miaphysites disagreed. They asserted that the human and the divine were fully merged and united in Christ, and they were convinced that salvation could occur only because God the Creator had literally felt the pain of death on the cross. It was God’s full identification with the human condition, even to the point of death, that made salvation possible. The idea that God can experience emotions and fully understand the suffering of humankind is something that many modern Christians would agree with almost instinctively, but the Chalcedonian tradition (in opposition to the Miaphysite view) rejected this possibility, saying that God the Father was apatheia (non-feeling) and unmoved by earthly matters. For Chalcedonians, only an unchanging God had the power to guarantee eternal salvation, while Miaphysites believed that only a truly passionate God could and would try to save humankind.

Theological differences alone do not create a schism. Breaks as significant as the Great Division require an institutional component, as well, and that component was largely supplied by Jacob Baradeus (500–578), bishop of the city of Edessa (in what is now southern Turkey). During the middle of the sixth century, bishop Jacob traveled thousands of miles back and forth across the Middle East (both within and outside the Roman Empire) in order to ordain hundreds of priests and dozens of bishops to be part of a new Miaphysite church hierarchy standing in opposition to the Roman Imperial Church and the Chalcedonian beliefs it championed. Because of his efforts, the Miaphysite tradition (especially in Syria) is also known as the Jacobite Church. Non-Chalcedonian Christians in Egypt had established their own institutional independence even earlier under the leadership of a Miaphysite bishop called Timothy the Cat (d. 477). Miaphysite Christians living within the borders of the Roman Empire were sometimes subjected to brutal persecution by the Roman government (with the support and blessing of the Imperial Chalcedonian-oriented Church), which Miaphysite Christians interpreted as indisputable evidence that Chalcedonian Christianity was itself heretical. How, they asked, could any follower of Jesus condone such violence against other Christian believers when Jesus himself had commanded his disciples to love each other?

Meanwhile, the Church of the East tradition diverged from Chalcedon Christianity in the opposite direction from the Miaphysites. Instead of seeing Christ’s personhood as a merger of the human and divine, Persian Christians stressed the separateness of the human and the divine in Christ. Persian Christians viewed ethics as central to Christian faith, and they accordingly viewed Jesus not only as a spiritual savior, but also as moral model for life. If Christ was to serve in this role, however – if Christ was to be seen as a realistic model for people to follow – he had to be fully and genuinely human and not somehow superhuman. One of the most well-known leaders of the Church of the East, the long-lived Catholicos Timothy I (728–823), made the argument that Christ had accomplished everything necessary for human salvation before his baptism by John in the River Jordan and that Christ remained on earth for three more years solely for the purpose of teaching his followers how they should live. Christ’s death on the cross was part of this instruction, and it showed Christians that they should not retaliate even when unjustly attacked by others. In contrast to Chalcedonians and Miaphysites who sometimes treated Christ’s humanity almost as an afterthought, the Church of the East placed Christ’s humanity at the center of their faith. (See Figure 1.3 for a summation of the Great Division and its Christological differences.)

Figure 1.3 Diagram of the Great Division summarizing Christological differences.

The Church of the East was the most missionary-minded of the three traditions formed by the Great Division, and its missionary-monks spread the gospel all along the Silk Road, a series of ancient trade routes that meandered across Central Asia and connected China with the Middle East. The cities and towns that dotted the Silk Road tended to be religiously diverse, as trade centers often are, and Christians in this environment quickly ascertained that an embracing message of welcome was much more effective than criticizing other religions. Church of the East missionaries reached the Chinese capital city of Chang’an (known as Xi’an today) in the year 635. The Chinese emperor was deeply impressed by their positive message, which focused on Christ as a teacher and stressed the virtues of kindness and compassion. One Church of the East sutra (poetic sermon) from those years reads in part:

Every being takes its refuge in You

And the light of Your Holy Compassion frees us all…

Great Teacher, I stand in awe of the Father.

Great Teacher, I am awed by the Holy Lord.

Great Teacher, I am speechless before the King of the Dharma.

Great Teacher, I am dazzled by the Enlightened Mind –

Great Teacher, you do everything to save us.

Everything looks to You, without thinking. Shower us with Your Healing Rain! Help us to overcome, give life to what has withered, And water the roots of kindness in us.⁴

The Chinese emperor dubbed Christianity the “religion of light,” and he permitted the Church of the East to build monasteries wherever it desired. The Church of the East flourished in China until the mid-800s when China took a sudden xenophobic turn. Both Buddhist and Christian missionaries were expelled from the country, but Christianity seems to have been especially impacted, perhaps because the leadership of the movement remained mostly non-Chinese. Church of the East missionaries returned to China in the tenth century but never regained the prestige they formerly had enjoyed. Outside of China, the Church of the East maintained a significant presence in Persia and Central Asia until the fourteenth century when it finally withered under intense Muslim persecution.