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Nestorius was a bishop around 1,600 years ago who objected to the title “Mother of God” (Greek: Theotokos) and insisted that the term “Mother of Christ” (Greek: Christotokos) be used instead.
Strictly speaking, Nestorianism refers to his teachings, which were denounced in 431 at the Council of Ephesus which was called primarily to resolve this dispute.
One of the core doctrinal statements of Christianity is that Christ is simultaneously fully human and fully God. The Nestorian position is that those two natures are separate natures (edit: and therefore, being the mother of Christ does not therefore make her the mother of God). Ephesus rejected this because a separation between the natures would have weird implications for the central element of Christianity, that Christ rising from the dead is how Man joins with God.
The term “Nestorian” is also frequently used for the Church of the East, which at the time was all Christian communities east of the Roman Empire (mainly in the Persian Empire, reached as far as China and southern India) because they didn’t accept the Council of Ephesus. Today, they have mostly died out (or in the case of southern India, were forced by the Portuguese colonial rulers to become Catholic and the ones who didn’t want to become Catholic ended up mainly becoming Miaphysite because that was the other main Christian church following Syriac practices) outside of the Assyrians, an Christian community mostly in northwestern Iraq. The Turks tried to exterminate them at the same time as the Armenians. Saddam Hussein tried to forcibly make them into Arabs, and then things got even worse after Saddam Hussein when the chaos that resulted from the American invasion made things *really bad* for the Assyrians, such as ISIS ruling over the Assyrian heartland.
Nestorianism is the belief that Jesus Christ is both God and a human. People who follow this idea think that Jesus has two separate parts: one part is God, and the other part is a human. They believe these parts don’t mix together but stay separate. It’s like having a cup with water and oil; both are in the cup, but they don’t mix.
If English Wikipedia is complicated, be sure to see if there’s a Simple English article (under the languages dropdown).
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestorianism
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