Nestorian

[ne-stawr-ee-uhn, -stohr-]

noun

1. one of a sect of followers of Nestorius who denied the hypostatic union and were represented as maintaining the existence of two distinct persons in Christ.

Other Word Forms

• Nestorianism noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of Nestorian¹

First recorded in 1400–50; late Middle English word from Late Latin word Nestoriānus. See Nestorius, -an

Example Sentences

When Baskerville arrived in Tabriz in 1907, he found an ancient frontier city, full of people of different religions — Muslims, Zoroastrians, Bahaists, Jews, Nestorian and Assyrian Christians — and ethnic groups — Persians, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, Georgians, Kurds.

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We climbed a promontory that descended past a fallow plot of farmland and ended at Mar Odisho, a Nestorian monastery with stones that looked like fresh loaves of bread.

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Hopkirk writes that it was supposedly Nestorian monks who smuggled silkworm eggs out of China in their staffs.

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A million people lived within Chang’an’s pounded-earth walls, including travelers and traders from Central, Southeast, South and Northeast Asia and followers of Buddhism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, Nestorian Christianity and Manichaeism.

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And as far back as the 6th century C.E., it helped the Byzantine Empire break China’s monopoly on silk production, when two Nestorian monks smuggled silkworms out of the Far East.

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