Page:Nestorius and his place in the history of Christian doctrine.djvu/138

126 had more influence on him than on the famous earlier teachers of his school. The tendency of his christology to start from the historical Christ and to apply not only the terms and  but also the term Son of God only to the historical Lord probably did not come only from his own endeavour to lay stress on the oneness of the historical person of Christ, but must have had a connection with the old tradition which had come down to him.

If all this is right Nestorius is justified in his thinking in a higher degree than if he had been shown to be orthodox in the sense of the later orthodoxy; for then he is nearer to the oldest theological tradition and nearer to the N.T. than this later orthodoxy itself.

Only two remarks are to be made in this respect. We are accustomed to the orthodox trinitarian and christological formulas as they appear when detached from the whole to which they originally belonged. Hence we do not see that in these formulas a mythology, actually contradicting the monotheistic belief, had gained the victory.

This is, however, shown just by the contrast between Nestorius and the Cyrillian orthodoxy. The council of 553 sanctioned, as we saw, the statement of the Scythian monks