foundation · 100 · Seleucia-Ctesiphon
Mari is remembered as one of the seventy-two, sent by Addai from Edessa into Mesopotamia, and as the founder of the see at Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the twin capital of the Parthian and then Sasanian empires. The Acts that tell it are late and legendary in the ordinary way, and the tradition is kept here and marked as tradition. What is not legendary is the consequence. The church that grew in Persia lay outside the Roman empire altogether, so it was never subject to an emperor who called councils, and it was periodically persecuted precisely because its neighbours across the frontier were Roman Christians and it looked like a fifth column. That independence shaped everything: it developed its own hierarchy under a catholicos at Seleucia-Ctesiphon, kept a theology closer to Antioch than to Alexandria, and sent missions along the trade roads to India, Central Asia and China, where a stele erected at Xi'an in 781 records a bishop and a mission by name. It is the one line in this dataset whose reach east matches Rome's reach west, and it is the one least represented in western histories.
Where does the Church of the East begin?
With a disciple sent from Edessa down the Tigris, in an account written much later.