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According to Acts 2:9 in the
Acts of the Apostles there were
Persians,
Parthians and
Medes among the very first new Christian converts at
Pentecost. Since then there has been a continuous
presence of Christians in Persia/Iran.
During the apostolic age,
Christianity began to establish itself throughout the
Mediterranean. However, a quite different Christian
culture developed on the eastern borders of the
Roman Empire and in
Persia.
Syriac Christianity owed much to preexistent
Jewish communities and the
Aramaic language. This language was most probably spoken
by
Jesus, and, in various modern forms is still spoken by
some Christians in Iran today (see
Assyrian Neo-Aramaic and
Senaya language). From Persia,
missionary activity established the
Saint Thomas Christians of
India and the
Nestorian Stele and
Daqin Pagoda in
China.
Early Christian communities
straddling the Roman-Persian border were in the midst of
civil strife. In 313, when
Constantine I proclaimed Christianity to be a tolerated
religion in the Roman Empire, the
Sassanid rulers of Persia adopted a policy of
persecution against Christians, including the double-tax of
Shapur II in the 340s. Christians were feared as a
subversive and possibly disloyal minority. In the early 5th
century official persecution increased once more. However,
from the reign of
Hormizd III (457-459) serious persecutions grew less
frequent and the church began to achieve recognised status.
Political pressure within Persia and cultural differences
with western Christianity were mostly to blame for the
Nestorian schism, in which the Persian church was
labelled
heretical. The
bishop of the Persian capital,
Ctesiphon, acquired the title first of
catholicos, and then
patriarch completely independent of any
Roman/Byzantine
hierarchy.
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