Holy Apostolic Assyrian Church of the East

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I have seen chuches of the Assyrian Church and I cant find any images in their sanctuary except the image of the cross in their altar. Is the Assyrian Church of the East iconoclast?
 
Quinzo said:
I have seen chuches of the Assyrian Church and I cant find any images in their sanctuary except the image of the cross in their altar. Is the Assyrian Church of the East iconoclast?
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No, they are not iconoclasts. To my knowledge, they simply just do not employ the use of many statues or icons.

Generally there is an icon of the Theotokos and Christ Child above every altar. Beyond that, I’m not sure. 🤷
 
ThatOneGuy92 said:
No, they are not iconoclasts. To my knowledge, they simply just do not employ the use of many statues or icons.

Generally there is an icon of the Theotokos and Christ Child above every altar. Beyond that, I’m not sure. 🤷
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I think that there imagery is mainly in the form of illuminated manuscripts and perhaps images outside of gospel books on the cover (like the four evangelists), but that they do not really use icons or statues in their churches. As far as I can tell they simply do not have an advanced theology regarding imagery and as such there is often some confusion and hostility toward iconography in their tradition. But as I said the objection I have heard aren’t usually well thought out and are full of inconstancies on their part.
 
ThatOneGuy92 said:
No, they are not iconoclasts. To my knowledge, they simply just do not employ the use of many statues or icons.

Generally there is an icon of the Theotokos and Christ Child above every altar. Beyond that, I’m not sure. 🤷
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Wait…correct me if I’m wrong, I’m not entirely sure they see her as “the Theotokos” (mother of God) because they believe Christ had two completely seperate natures. Wait do they? 🤷 Aren’t they Nestorians? :confused:
 
Quinzo said:
I have seen chuches of the Assyrian Church and I cant find any images in their sanctuary except the image of the cross in their altar. Is the Assyrian Church of the East iconoclast?
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Despite a classical history of exquisite statuary from their pre-Christian era, neither the Assyrians nor their counterparts, the Ancient Church of the East, have any tradition neither of iconography nor of statuary. That their Chaldean Catholic descendents have an extremely limited (and chiefly recent) usage of iconography - and more so of statuary - is a result of latinizing influences on their Church.
 
I went to the Assyrian Church of the East once, there is a big Assyrian Community near me. The People were extremely hospitable, however I was dissappointed that nothing in their Liturgy mentions the Theotokos and Ever Virgin Mary …They hold to Nestorianism, so there you have it . Now some a very small few hold to the Orthodox Faith God Bless them, and I also see these people at my local Orthodox Parish . and a few of them are “Chaldean” , but yeah thats the whole deal with the Assyrian Church
 
followingtheway said:
Wait…correct me if I’m wrong, I’m not entirely sure they see her as “the Theotokos” (mother of God) because they believe Christ had two completely seperate natures. Wait do they? 🤷 Aren’t they Nestorians? :confused:
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As one Assyrian priest explained to me - “we were never Nestorians, we were just stuck up here in the mountains while the councils were going on. We never rejected them, we just never thought they were relevant to us.”

A “Nestorian” monk from China gave his profession of faith to the Pope in the 13th century and was accepted as Catholic, both parties having by this time forgotten about each other’s existence. They took the label “Nestorian” when they were suffering persecution from the Persian Empire because of their political association with the Roman Empire with whom Persia was usually at war.

Our references to the Theotokos were added AFTER Chalcedon in order to confute the Nestorian heresy. They never had much to do with Chalcedon and never changed their Liturgy.
 
Quinzo said:
I have seen chuches of the Assyrian Church and I cant find any images in their sanctuary except the image of the cross in their altar. Is the Assyrian Church of the East iconoclast?
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I read once (don’t remember where) about an Assyrian priest being shown a crucifix (back before intercourse between Persia and Europe became common) and violently rejecting it as obviously being a taunt from the blasphemous Jews, because it shows Christ’s crucifixion rather than an empty cross after His Resurrection. I don’t know how common an attitude that is among them.
 
Diakonia said:
Despite a classical history of exquisite statuary from their pre-Christian era, neither the Assyrians nor their counterparts, the Ancient Church of the East, have any tradition neither of iconography nor of statuary. That their Chaldean Catholic descendents have an extremely limited (and chiefly recent) usage of iconography - and more so of statuary - is a result of latinizing influences on their Church.
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Are these latinizing influences necessarily a bad thing, in this case?
 
followingtheway said:
Wait…correct me if I’m wrong, I’m not entirely sure they see her as “the Theotokos” (mother of God) because they believe Christ had two completely seperate natures. Wait do they? 🤷 Aren’t they Nestorians? :confused:
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To be quite honest, it depends on who you ask.

They claim that they are not Nestorians. Others do, based on the fact that they have never officially accepted the Council of Chalcedon. They claim that this does not mean that they hold heterothodox beliefs. Others claim it does for if they held orthodox belief, they would have accepted the Council.
As you can see, this could go on and on.

I’m leaving this one to those who have a higher pay grade than I do.
 
In a city where I formerly lived was a small Assyrian church that I visited once. They had a deacon but no priest. The deacon told me that Our Lady is not the Mother of God, but only the mother of the human part of Jesus. He also told me that God did not die on the cross but only the human part of Jesus. They seem to divide Christ into two seperate people. In fact he got very agitated talking about this. This sounds very Nestorian to me.

Other info about Nestorians or at least these local people. The head of their church (Patriarch?) is hereditary going from father to son.

The men and women stand on seperate sides of the church and the men wear buttoned collars but no ties, the women wear long dresses and head scarfs.

They not only claim to have bread from the Last Supper baked into the current bread, but also claim to have water form Jesus’ baptism they mix with the water in their font.
 
The Assyrian Church of the East is not in communion with Rome.

Its Catholic equivalent is called the Chaldean Catholic Church
 
andrewstx said:
Other info about Nestorians or at least these local people. The head of their church (Patriarch?) is hereditary going from father to son.
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The Catholicosate-Patriarchate was formerly nepotic - that is, it passed from uncle to nephew. That was the case from the 15th or 16th century until 1975, when Catholicos-Patriarch Simun XXIII, of blessed memory, the last hereditary patriarch, reposed.
The men and women stand on seperate sides of the church and the men wear buttoned collars but no ties, the women wear long dresses and head scarfs.
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So?
They not only claim to have bread from the Last Supper baked into the current bread, …
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Tradition says that this ‘starter’ was brought to them by Blessed Addai, one of the 70 Disciples ans, specifically, a disciple associated with the missions of St Thomas. A piece of the dough is kept from each baking of the liturgical bread and used in the baking of the next. It is a holy and revered tradition.
 
BVT said:
actually the term Assyrian were given to this church(Church of the east) by Anglicans…
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It is unfortunate that this myth persists. Current scholarship does not support this contention. Please see Assyriologist Dr. Simo Parpola’s paper on Assyrian identity, here.

The self-appellation has never been inconsistent with the “Assyrian” identity. Whatever title Westerners apply to these people, should not be mistaken for what the people have called themselves, in their native tongue (please see the continuation post, below).
*t is important to draw attention to the fact that the Aramaic-speaking peoples of the Near East have since ancient times identified themselves as Assyrians and still continue to do so. The self-designations of modern Syriacs and Assyrians, Sūryōyō and Sūrāyā, are both derived from the ancient Assyrian word for “Assyrian”, Aššūrāyu, as can be easily established from a closer look at the relevant words.
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The word Aššūrāyu is an adjective derived from the geographical and divine name Aššur with the gentilic suffix -āyu. This name was originally pronounced [Aššūr], with a palato-alveolar fricative, but owing to a sound shift, its pronunciation was turned to [Aθθūr] in the early second millennium BC. The common Aramaic word for Assyria, Āθūr, reflects this pronunciation and in all probability dates back to the twelfth century BC, when the Aramean tribes first came into contact with the Assyrians. Towards the end of the second millennium, another sound shift took place in Assyrian, turning the pronunciation of the name into ***ūr]. Since unstressed vowels and even whole syllables were often dropped in Neo-Assyrian at the beginning of words, this name form later also had a shorter variant, [Sūr], attested in alphabetic writings of personal names containing the element Aššur in late seventh century BC Aramaic documents from Assyria. The Neo-Assyrian word ***ūrāyu], “Assyrian”, thus likewise had a shorter variant [Sūrāyu] in the seventh century. This variant is hidden behind standard orthography in Assyrian cuneiform texts, but its existence is confirmed by the classical Greek words for Assyrians and Assyria, which display a corresponding variation between forms with initial A- (Assúrios/Assuría) and ones without it (Súrios/Súros/Suría; see AppendixIII).The Greeks, who were in frequent contact with Assyria in the eighth and seventh centuries BC,57 would not have borrowed the word without the initial A-, had the Assyrians themselves not omitted it, since omission of initial vowels is not a feature of classical Greek phonology.
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Phonologically, Modern Assyrian Sūrāyā perfectly agrees with Neo-Assyrian [Sūrāyu], while Syriac Sūryōyō displays an intrusive yod, which it shares with Greek Súrios and Suría. This intrusive yod surely is due to Greek influence, since in classical Syriac the word also occurs in the form Sūrōyō, in perfect agreement with the Modern Assyrian Sūrāyā. It is worth noting that Sūrāyā is reported to have a variant with initial A-, but this is avoided in careful speech, since it instinctively sounds incorrect in view of the classical Syriac Sūryōyō. Since omission of initial vowels is not a feature of Aramaic phonology, the lack of the initial A- in Sūrāyā/Sūr(y)ōyō cannot be due to internal Aramaic development but must go back directly to Neo-Assyrian.
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Footnotes:
**ūr] ~ [Sūr] has a perfect parallel in the NA forms of another important divine name, Ištar (NA ), which was also realized as Šār] in Neo-Assyrian, see PNA 1/I, xxv. As in the case of [Sūr], the short form Šār] is effectively concealed behind the prodominantly logographic or ossified cuneiform spellings of the divine name ((d)15, dINNIN, dIŠ.TAR), but its existence is raised beyond any doubt by the NA spellings of the Urartian royal name Sarduri Šārdūri], which is written varyingly as m(d)15-du-ri, mdINNIN-du-ri or msa-ar-du-ri in the Neo-Assyrian royal inscriptions (see PNA 2/I 568f; note also the spelling URU.15-BÀD-a-ni = Sarduriani in ABL 147 = SAA 5 97 r.11). The “rebus” spellings m(d)15-du-ri and mdINNIN-BÀD/du-ri, implying the short form Šār], are already attested in several inscriptions of Tiglath-Pileser III from c. 740 BC, and continue to be found in the letters and inscriptions of Sargon II (721-705) and Assurbanipal (668-630; for the latter, note m15-BÀD LUGAL KUR.ur-arţi in Streck 1916, 84:40, and mdIŠ.TAR-du-r]i LUGAL KUR.ú-ra-ar-ţi-im-[ma], ABL 1240:4-5). Like [Sūr], the short form Šār] is also explicitly attested in Aramaic alphabetic spelling (cf. šrdrq’l = md15–BÀD-qa-a-li , AECT 31) and in NB spellings of the Neo-Assyrian name Issār-tarība (mdiš-šar–ta-ri-bi, mdiš-šár–ta-ribi, mšar–ta-ri-bi, mdšár–ta-ri-bi, md15–ta-ri-bi, and mdIŠ.TAR–ta-ri-bi, all referring tothe same person), see Zadok 1984, 4.
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Regarding their vernacular, Assyrian-Aramaic:
Within a relatively short period of time-already by the middle of the eighth century Aramaic became established as a common language (lingua franca) throughout the Empire (Garelli 1982; Tadmor 1975, 1985; Eph’al 1999, 118-119). Concomitantly with this, the Assyrian administration started using the Aramaic alphabet alongside the cuneiform script. Aramean scribes writing on papyrus or parchment scrolls beside Assyrian scribes writing on clay tablets or waxed writing-boards are depicted on royal reliefs from the mideighth century on (Tadmor 1982, 1991), and Aramean scribes working with Assyrian ones are mentioned in administrative documents already half a century earlier. 11 By about 700 BC, the Aramaic alphabet effectively replaced cuneiform as the Empire’s everyday writing system (Parpola 1997b, xvi).
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Their primary language of communication, however, like the rest of the Empire’s, was certainly Aramaic, and the entire ruling class, including the royal family, must have been fully bilingual by the beginning of the seventh century at the very latest. All Neo-Assyrian kings from Tiglath Pileser III to Esarhaddon had Aramaic-speaking wives or mothers (Kamil 1999; Melville 1999; PNA s.w. Ataliā, Iaba and Naqī’ a), and there are indications that at least some of them spoke Aramaic as their first language.
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Assyriologist, Dr. Simo Parpola​

In sum, the evidence adduced above demonstrates that the dialects of Modern
Assyrian are unlikely to be direct descendants of the literary Syriac language,
although they are undoubtedly related to it. Rather they existed side-by-side
with it for centuries. Some of the features of the modern spoken dialects that
differ from literary Syriac can be shown to have emerged at a much earlier
period by the fact that they occasionally surface in written texts by a process
of linguistic interference. Some features of morphology, moreover, are
typologically more archaic than the corresponding features in Syriac.
Likewise, some lexical items of the modern dialects are not attested in Syriac
but have roots that can be traced to antiquity in the Akkadian language.
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Dr. Geoffrey Khan, Cambridge Professor of Semitic Philology​

Post Empire

The Melammu Project:

Aramaic = Assyrian language
5th century BCE
Achaemenid Empire
Greek philosophers and scholars
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Thucydides reports that the Persian Artaphernes, who was carrying a message from the Great King to Sparta, was taken prisoner, brought to Athens, and the letters he was carrying were translated from the Assyrian language.
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Thucydides 4.50.2:
He was conducted to Athens, where the Athenians got his dispatches translated from the Assyrian character (Assuriôn grammatôn) and read them.
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jewfaq.org/alephbet.htm
[T]he Hebrew (Aramaic) alphabet that [Jews] use today is referred to as Assyrian Script (in Hebrew, K’tav Ashuri).
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The deacon told me that Our Lady is not the Mother of God, but only the mother of the human part of Jesus. He also told me that God did not die on the cross but only the human part of Jesus. They seem to divide Christ into two seperate people. In fact he got very agitated talking about this. This sounds very Nestorian to me.
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What is interesting is that Muhammad was instructed by a Nestorian priest who was related to his wife I believe. Hence the possible origin of the Muslim belief that Jesus was not crucified on the cross.

Another interesting observation is that there is a whole spectrum of apostolic Christians that adhere to more or less ecumenical councils. The Church of the East would be at the bottom of the list and Roman rite Catholicism would be at the top. Maybe God intended it to this way so that we can see that the church has always been Catholic despite theological developments and refinements through time.

We’re even seeing this today within the Roman rite with the SSPX who reject VII.
 
Do the Assyrians (and Chaldean Catholics) recognize the same seven sacraments as the rest of the Church? This website of the the Holy Catholic Apostolic Assyrian Church of the East diocese of Australia makes it seem like they acknowledge a few different sacraments: assyrianchurch.org.au/about-us/the-sacraments

If the Assyrians and/or Chaldeans do not recognize the same sacraments, why is it they are still said to profess a catholic faith? No disrespect to Assyrians or Chaldeans intended, I am just curious.
 
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