Iran is often imagined as an ancient and unmistakably Islamic civilisation – but Iran was not always Iran, and the Persia before it was not always Islamic. Before the Rashidun caliphate, and well before the current rule of the ayatollahs, the Sasanian empire of the 3rd to 7th centuries sheltered one of the least remembered but nonetheless remarkable Christian worlds in history. At the centre of it stood a Christian queen: Shirin.
Who was this Persian queen and what kind of Christianity did she profess? The Church of the East we have somewhat clumsily called “Nestorian” after the teachings of Nestorius, who was condemned and deposed at the Council of Ephesus in the 5th century. Telling your heretical Nestorian, Monophysite or Miaphysite apart from one another, let alone from your good, sound, orthodox Dyophysite, leaves me somewhat bewildered. Nonetheless, these arguments mattered profoundly to the understanding and early definition of Christian orthodoxy. They were also affected by politics in that from the time of Constantine there was a distinct interplay between the imperial state and the realm of the Church. Emperors and bishops alike were concerned to define correct teaching as well as suppress any deviation from it. The heresies that emperors sought to extirpate found homes beyond the confines of imperial jurisdiction.
