Shall This Nation Die
By: Rev. Joseph Naayem
An Historical Essay On The Assyro-Chaldean Christians
By: Rev. Gabriel Oussani
St. Joseph’s Seminary, Dunwoodie, New York
Oct. 1st, 1920
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The Assyro-Chaldean nation embraced Christianity, if not during the first, certainly during the middle of the second century. Setting aside the controversy as to the early evangelization of Edessa in Upper Mesopotamia during the reign of King Abgar (circa 35 A. D.) and the traditional propagation of the Gospel throughout Mesopotamia by the Apostles Thomas, Addai and Mari, it is unanimously agreed by all scholars that towards the end of the second century the Christian religion had penetrated into the whole country inhabited by the Assyro-Chaldeans.
In the 3rd and 4th centuries, they already possessed a highly developed and well organized hierarchy, with numerous dioceses and churches, a Patriarchal See, stationed at Seleucia-Ctesiphon on the lower Tigris and a Christian population exercising, at times, a far-reaching political and religious influence over the Sassanian dynasty of Persia and the Arabian dynasty of Hira.
During the 4th, 5th and 6th centuries, the Assyro-Chaldean Church became so extensive and powerful that it excited the fear and the hatred of the Sassanian kings of Persia, who determined to exterminate it with a series of almost uninterrupted persecutions and unheard-of cruelties. Hundreds of thousands of martyrs gave their lives willingly for the faith of Christ. Patriarchs, bishops, priests, virgins, widows, children and adults, noble and poor, vied one with the other in their faith and love for Christ, and were massacred with tortures the like of which was not even dreamed of by the most cruel of Roman Emperors.
And if the number of martyrs in the Roman Empire during the first three or four centuries, according to a generous estimate, may have reached the grand total of 200,000, that of the Assyro-Chaldean martyrs in the Persian Empire, form the 3rd to the 7th century, must have reached the half million mark and perhaps twice that number. Entire cities and whole districts were destroyed and their Christian inhabitants slaughtered.
