c. 1996 Religion News Service

NEW BRITAIN, Conn (RNS)-Jesus and his fellow Nazarenes would feel right at home at services here at St. Thomas Assyrian Church of the East.

The Aramaic used in the liturgy isn’t exactly what Jesus and his apostles spoke but is believed to be close.

Being familiar with Aramaic makes one feel closer to the culture and times of Jesus, says the Rev. George Toma, the Iraqi-born pastor of St. Thomas. Many of the 120 families that are members have origins in Iran and Iraq, where Assyrians are a Christian minority among Muslims.

The Assyrian Church of the East, founded by disciples of Jesus in the first century among Assyrians of the Persian Empire, is one of only a few that uses Syriac, a variant of the Aramaic common in the holy land in biblical times.

The church has an estimated 800,000 members scattered throughout the world, including about 150,000 in the United States. The largest concentrations are in Chicago and Modesto, Calif.

The head of the church, Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV, no longer welcome in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, transferred his headquarters from Baghdad to Chicago last year.”Assyrians are a people without a country. The only thing we have left is our church,”says Toma, 38, who came to the United States in 1988.

The Assyrian Church has been making a concerted effort to end 1,500 years of estrangement from the rest of Christendom. The church has been considered heretical by the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches ever since the third ecumenical council at Ephesus in 431 A.D.

Toma is on a 10-member commission of Assyrians and Roman Catholics that has been meeting for a decade to resolve the differences.

The dispute had to do with the nature of Jesus. It was commonly accepted that Mary, through the Holy Spirit, gave birth to Jesus, who Christians believe to be the son of God.

But followers of the Constantinople patriarch Nestorius refused to call Mary the”Mother of God.”Instead the Nestorians insisted on the title”Mother of Christ.” The council wound up deposing Nestorius and ostracized his followers, including the Assyrian Church of the East.

But last month in Rome, Toma says, his”Nestorian”church and the Catholic Church agreed that each side had misunderstood the other. The Nestorians thought those calling Mary”the Mother of God”were obscuring the humanity of Jesus. The church council believed the Nestorians were downgrading, if not denying outright, the divinity of Jesus. Byzantine political intrigue played a part in the dispute.”In the end, we agreed we both believe the same thing, (that) Jesus was perfectly human and perfectly divine,”Toma says.

On Nov. 29, the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, reported that reunion between the two churches is near.”It’s quite an interesting development and opened the way to the Church of the East to officially becoming a member of the Middle East Council of Churches,”says Kenneth Thomas, a scholar and translator with the American Bible Society in New York and a former missionary in Iran.”For them to join that council they had to be considered orthodox in their beliefs by the Roman Catholic Church,”he says.

After the breakthrough in Rome, the group met with Pope John Paul II. Toma says the pope”appreciated what the commission was doing and he prayed for us.” The pope, Toma says, has a keen interest in restoring Christian unity, particularly with historic Eastern Orthodox and other churches such as the Assyrian Church.

The Assyrians have as a model the Chaldeans, another group of descendants of the Nestorians based in Babylonia in Iraq, who united with Rome 300 years ago. Their service is virtually indistinguishable from that of the Assyrian Church. Many Chaldean Catholics live in the Detroit area.

Further conversations will be held to clear up other issues before full communion can be established, Toma says. The largest question has to do with how the pope exercises authority.”I can see the need to have a father, someone to guide us, a shepherd, a servant, one who is a sign of Christian unity, but not in the sense of a dictatorship,”Toma says.

MJP END RENNER