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Rh without wives. The precise time when marriage was prohibited to the higher clergy has not been ascertained. The catholicos Mar Abd Yeshua, writing in the seventh century, has a chapter on marriage and virginity, in which no restriction is assigned to clerical marriage. A work called Bebboreetha, by Schlémon, the metropolitan of Bosra, refers to several wives of patriarchs. Another work states that the metropolitan of Nisibis about the twelfth century, himself a married man, convened a synod which decreed that bishops should be allowed to marry. This shows that there were opponents of episcopal marriage in the Syrian Church at that time, although they proved only to be a minority who could be thwarted by a synod.

The Nestorian Church in Eastern Syria and Persia was organised under an archbishop usually known as the catholicos; and in the year 498 the catholicos assumed the title of "Patriarch of the East." He was fully justified in wearing this proud title. As a Nestorian heretic he was entirely free from the patriarchate of Antioch, which from time to time had claimed to exercise jurisdiction over Mesopotamia, but which had now cut off and anathematised all his Church. On the other hand, the wide and continuous extension of Christianity in the Far East as a result of the labours of the Nestorian missionaries was giving him an immense extent of patriarchal territory, for all the converts in the new districts were taught to look to the catholicos as their ecclesiastical head. The seat of the patriarchate was at the twin-cities of Seleucia and Ctesiphon, one of which was on the western and the other on the eastern bank of the Tigris. These cities together formed the centre of trade and travel between Europe and Western Asia on one side, and India and China on the other. Caravans with Oriental products destined to minister to the luxury of more prosperous nations, came back from visits to the industrious populations of those mysterious distant empires of which as yet Europe knew little, and displayed their wares in the bazaars of this great emporium.