,
West Azerbaijan,
Iran. Believed by some to have been first built in 66 AD by
Saint Jude. Local
Armenians believe that he and Simon were both buried here. In 1329, the church was reconstructed after an earthquake destroyed the structure in 1319. near
Urmia,
Iran. According to the
Acts of the Apostles there were
Persians,
Parthians and
Medes among the first new Christian converts at
Pentecost. Since then there has been a continuous presence of Christians in
Iran. During the
apostolic age Christianity began to establish itself throughout the
Mediterranean. However, a quite different
Semitic-speaking Christian culture developed on the eastern borders of the
Roman Empire and in
Persia.
Syriac Christianity owed much to preexistent
Jewish communities and to the
Aramaic language. This language had been spoken by
Jesus, and, in various modern
Eastern Aramaic forms is still spoken by the ethnic
Assyrian Christians in
Iran, northeast
Syria, southeast
Turkey and
Iraq today (see
Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, and
Senaya language). From Persian-ruled
Assyria (
Assuristan),
missionary activity spread
Eastern-Rite Syriac Christianity throughout
Assyria and
Mesopotamia, and from there into
Persia,
Asia Minor,
Syria, the
Caucasus and
Central Asia, establishing the
Saint Thomas Christians of India and erecting the
Nestorian Stele and the
Daqin Pagoda in China. Early Christian communities straddling the Roman-Persian border found themselves in the midst of civil strife. In 313, when
Constantine I proclaimed Christianity a tolerated religion in the Roman Empire, the
Sassanid rulers of Persia adopted a policy of persecution against Christians, including the double-tax of
Shapur II in the 340s. The Sassanids feared the Christians as a subversive and possibly disloyal minority. In the early-5th century official persecution increased once more. However, from the reign of
Hormizd III (457–459) serious persecutions grew less frequent and the Persian church began to achieve a recognized status. Through the
Battle of Avarayr (451) and the
resultant treaty of 484, for example, the Persian Empire's numerous
Armenian subjects gained the official right to profess Eastern Christianity freely. Political pressure within Persia and cultural differences with western Christianity were mostly to blame for the
Nestorian schism, in the course of which the Roman Empire church hierarchy labelled the
Church of the East heretical. The
bishop of
Ctesiphon (the capital of the
Sassanid Empire) acquired the title first of
catholicos, and then
patriarch, completely independent of any
Roman/
Byzantine hierarchy. Many old churches remain in Iran from the early days of Christianity. Some historians regard the Assyrian
Church of Mart Maryam (St. Mary) in northwestern Iran, for example, as the second-oldest church in Christendom after the Church of Bethlehem in the West Bank. A Chinese princess, who contributed to its reconstruction in 642 AD, has her name engraved on a stone on the church wall. The famous Italian traveller
Marco Polo also described the church following his visit. The
Arab Islamic conquest of Persia, in the 7th century, originally benefited Christians as they were a protected minority under Islam. However, from about the 10th century religious tension led to persecution once more. The influence of European Christians placed Near Eastern Christians in peril during the
Crusades. From the mid-13th century,
Mongol rule was a relief to Persian Christians until the
Ilkhanate adopted Islam at the turn of the 14th century. The Christian population gradually declined to a small minority. Christians disengaged from mainstream society and withdrew into ethnic
ghettos (mostly
Assyrian and
Armenian speaking). Persecution against Christians revived in the 14th century; when the Muslim warlord of Turco-Mongol descent
Timur (Tamerlane) conquered Persia,
Mesopotamia,
Syria, and
Asia Minor, he ordered large-scale massacres of Christians in Mesopotamia, Persia, Asia Minor and Syria. Most of the victims were indigenous Assyrians and Armenians, members of the Assyrian Church of the East and of Orthodox Churches. In 1445 a part of the
Sureth-speaking
Church of the East entered into communion with the
Catholic Church (mostly in the
Ottoman Empire, but also in Persia). This group had a faltering start but has existed as a separate church since
Pope Julius III consecrated
Yohannan Sulaqa as
Chaldean Patriarch of Babylon in 1553. Most
Assyrian Catholics in Iran today are members of the
Chaldean Catholic Church. The community that remains independent is the
Assyrian Church of the East, but both churches now have much smaller memberships in Iran than the
Armenian Apostolic Church. The number of Christians in Iran was further significantly boosted through various policies of the subsequent kingdoms that ruled from 1501. For example, in 1606 during the
Ottoman–Safavid War (1603–18), king
Abbas I resettled some 300,000 Armenians deeper within modern-day Iran, as well as establishing their own quarter in the then-capital Isfahan, which is still largely populated by Christian
Armenians some four centuries later: the
New Julfa district. Other hundreds of thousands of Christian
Georgians and
Circassians were furthermore deported and resettled during the same Safavid era and in the later
Qajar era within Iran, although both communities are exclusively Muslim nowadays. In the 18th and 19th centuries,
Protestant missionaries began to evangelize in Persia. They directed their operations towards supporting the extant churches of the country while improving education and health-care. Unlike the older, ethnic churches, these evangelical Protestants began to engage with the ethnic Persian Muslim community. Their printing presses produced much religious material in various languages. Some Persians subsequently converted to Protestantism and their churches still exist within Iran (using the
Persian language). A Russian
spiritual mission was operating in Iran by the beginning of the 20th century and, by 1917, there were about fifty Russian Orthodox churches. Over the next three years, everything that had been created over the previous three centuries was lost. In the early 1940s, a Russian church reappeared in Iran thanks to the donations of Russian emigrants -
St. Nicholas Cathedral, which was under the administration of the
Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia. In the 1980s and 1990s, the church was gradually abandoned, and in 1995, at the request of its parishioners, St. Nicholas Church was annexed to the
Moscow Patriarchate. In the early 20th century, once again Iran's stable and extant Christian population was boosted – this time due to the effects of the
Assyrian genocide (1914–1924) and the
Armenian genocide (1914–1923), as many tens of thousands of refugees poured in. However, both massacres drastically negatively affected Iran's Christian population as well, as
Ottoman troops crossed the Iranian border in the later stages of
World War I and massacred many tens of thousands of Armenians and Assyrians within Iran's borders as well, especially in
West Azerbaijan Province, but also in adjacent provinces. Vibrant, huge and millennia-old native Christian communities in these parts of Iran were virtually shattered by the Ottoman actions, being reduced from formerly composing majorities in some of the regions, to very small – though noticeable – surviving communities. Prior to World War I and the Assyrian genocide, the population of
Urmia was 40% to 50% Christian, for example. In 1918, during the
Persian Campaign, about half of the Assyrians of Persia died in Turkish and Kurdish massacres and in related outbreaks of starvation and disease. About 80 percent of Assyrian clergy and spiritual leaders perished, threatening the nation's ability to survive as a unit. == Current situation ==