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20 and the Church that had grown up over the Persian frontier with a Metropolitan at Ktesiphon (near Baghdad on the Tigris) fell away too. So Antioch lost her Eastern provinces.

The kings of Persia, who had persecuted their Catholic subjects, were glad to encourage a form of Christianity that had no connection with the religion of the Roman Empire. Meanwhile the Emperor persecuted the heretics. In 489 Zeno (474–491) closed the school at Edessa, which was then reopened over the frontier at Nisibis, and large numbers of Syrian Nestorians fled to Persia.

But the other heresy, Monophysism, the extreme opposite of Nestorius's teaching, did still more harm to the Church of Antioch. Here what happened was almost an exact copy of what we saw in Egypt. A large proportion of Western Syrians would not accept the decrees of Chalcedon. Monophysism had one factor in common with its extreme antithesis, and a factor that commended it just as much—it was an opposition to the faith of the tyrant on the Bosphorus. For a time they succeed in getting a Monophysite appointed to the See of Antioch, then Justinian (527–565) tries to cut short their orders. Severus of Antioch (512–518) belonged to their party, but, after his death in 548 (he had been deposed and exiled in 518), the Government shut up all suspect bishops in monasteries to prevent them from ordaining any successors. But the Empress Theodora was their friend. At Constantinople she arranges for two Monophysite monks to be ordained bishop, Theodore and James Zanzalos. Theodore was to go to Bostra and have jurisdiction over all the Monophysites of Arabia and Palestine; James to Edessa for Syria, Mesopotamia, and Asia Minor (543). Theodore disappeared without leaving a trace; James Zanzalos travelled all over the East, and built up an anti-Chalcedonian hierarchy. In Egypt he finds two Coptic bishops imprisoned in a convent. Secretly with them he ordains other bishops, among them Sergius of Tella, for Antioch. This Sergius begins the rival line of Monophysite Patriarchs. He has on his side nearly all the Syrian population: the Orthodox bishop rules over only the Government party of Greeks (called Melkites here, as in Egypt) in the capital. James had the honour of giving his name to the