The “Ecumenical” Council of Ephesus (431 AD) and a “Great Schism” that was greater than the Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox split of 1054

There is a claim that "the church was unified under the pope until 1054". But there was a "schism" centuries earlier than that, which is a far larger and messier divide than the 1054 schism between the Roman and Orthodox churches. It makes a lie of the "unified under the pope" claims of today's Roman Catholic apologists.

In fact, if you consider that "the papacy" didn't even come fully "developed" until Leo I (461 AD) -- and that it's still "developing" now under "Pope Francis", you've got the "unified Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox church under the pope" from say 461 AD - 1054 AD.

The churches in Asia, "the churches of the east", which had no idea that there was a "Petrine ministry" for many centuries, had as much of a claim to "apostolic succession" as did any of the European churches, and which grew far larger than any of the churches in Europe, before being snuffed out by Islam -- not in the 6th or 7th centuries, but the 12th and 13th centuries, likely a response to (a) the Mongol invasions (which were favorable to Christianity), and (b) the Crusades. (Not saying there were no massacres prior to the Crusades. But the Crusades exacerbated a bad situation).

Here are a couple of works overviewing these "Churches of the East":

Samuel Hugh Moffett: "A History of Christianity in Asia"

Philip Jenkins: The Lost History of Christianity

Mar Bawai Soro: The Church of the East: Apostolic and Orthodox

Here is how Moffett describes this "Great Schism" of the 5th century:

What finally divided the early church, East from West, Asia from Europe, was neither war nor persecution, but the blight of a violent theological controversy, that raged through the Mediterranean world in the second quarter of the fifth century. It came to be called the Nestorian controversy, and how much of it was theological and how much political is still being debated, but it irreversibly split the church not only east and west but also north and south and cracked it into so many pieces that it was never the same again. Out of it came an ill-fitting name for the church in non-Roman Asia, "Nestorian."

I've seen some people on the web throw around the word "Nestorian" as if it were a dreadful curse on someone. But I'm not at all inclined to believe that these "Nestorian" churches were anything less than authentic Christians, whose demise was set up (though not caused by) the "western" churches. Here is a video of the Eastern Orthodox bishop Kallistos Ware flatly stating that the Churches of the East never held to "Nestorianism", and that "Nestorius himself did not hold the Nestorian heresy": http://www.oltv.tv/id518.html

Here is Moffett, citing as well from a 5th century document that for centuries had been repressed:

On Easter Sunday in 429, Cyril publicly denounced Nestorius for heresy. With fine disregard for anything Nestorius had actually said, he accused him of denying the deity of Christ. It was a direct and incendiary appeal to the emotions of the orthodox, rather than to precise theological definition or scriptural exegesis, and, as he expected, an ecclesiastical uproar followed. Cyril showered Nestorius with twelve bristling anathemas.... As tempers mounted, a Third Ecumenical Council was summoned to meet in Ephesus in 431 ....

[it was] the most violent and least equitable of all the great councils. It is an embarrassment and blot on the history of the church. … Nestorius … arrived late and was asking the council to wait for him and his bishops. Cyril, who had brought fifty of his own bishops with him, arrogantly opened the council anyway, over the protests of the imperial commissioner and about seventy other bishops. …

They acted … as if it was a war they were conducting, and the followers of [Cyril] … went about in the city girt and armed with clubs … with the yells of barbarians, snorting fiercely … raging with extravagant arrogance against those whom they knew to be opposed to their doings, carrying bells about the city and lighting fires. They blocked up the streets so that everyone was obliged to fee and hide, while they acted as masters of the situation, lying about, drunk and besotted and shouting obscenities.…

(Moffet p. 174 -- citing the Bazaar of Heraclides, a late work of Nestorius).

The anathemas of this council were directed at Nestorius; they ratified 12 “anathemas” that, as Moffett relates, had nothing to do with Nestorius’s actual teachings.

Jaroslav Pelikan talks about this period in the first of his five volumes on the history of "development". After citing the "Definition" of Chalcedon in its entirety, Pelikan then goes on to say, "the genealogy of this decree makes clear that the formula is not an original and new creation, but like a mosaic, was assembled almost entirely from stones that were already available."

These were:

Second Letter of Cyril to Nestorius
Letter of Cyril to the Antiochenes
the "union" formula of 433
The Tome of Leo

Pelikan says, "The phrase "not divided or separated into two persons" appears to have come from Theodoret, of whom he said earlier, "had in many ways assumed the mantle of Nestorius as the defender of the theology of the indwelling logos." Further:

Although the Chalcedonian formula did not in fact say any of these things unequivocally, it did seem to allow room for them; hence it could even be, and indeed was, taken as a vindication of the Nestorian position. If anything, the relation of the formula to the other alternative was even less clear and certainly less reassuring in the long run. It was undeniable that the formula taught a hypostatic union of sorts: "combining in one person and hypostasis." It also referred to the Virgin as Theotokos and required that, though there be two natures, they be acknowledged as "without division, without separation." For the theology of the hypostatic union, this was a good beginning, but no more than a beginning. The really difficult problems were either ignored or disposed of by equivocation. It was not clear, for example, who the subject of suffering and crucifixion was, for these events in the history of salvation were not so much as mentioned. Presumably, the references to "one and the same" near the beginning and near the end would indicate that he, in the concreteness of his total person both divine and human, was the subject, but this was not specified.

Conversely, all the warnings against any confusion of the two natures left the proponents of the hypostatic union unsatisfied on their fundamental soteriological point: that the ultimate deification of man had its inception in the union of the humanity of Christ with his divinity in an intimate and inseparable wholeness of person. And perhaps the most crucial problem of all, evident in almost any creedal statement but especially obvious with this one, was the hermeneutical one. The creed opened with the claim that it was "following the holy fathers" and concluded with specific references not only to the prophets of the OT and to the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament, but also to the authority of "the symbol of the fathers." In the light of the delibrerations at Ephesus and the issues in the controversy, this almost certainly referred to the creed of Nicea. But everyone laid claim to that authority and depending on which of the "holy fathers" one cited, Nicea and now Chalcedon, could be interpreted in any of several ways. It was, then, an agreement to disagree." (Pelikan, vol 1, pgs 265-266.)

Of course, Nestorius was accused of things (by Cyril) that he never espoused. Moffett also goes into a good bit of detail about this. It seems very much to have followed the kind of fault lines that the Reformation later followed. But why is it that this huge event is so little reported by either the Roman Catholics or the Eastern Orthodox?

John Frame discusses it from a theological perspective: http://reformedperspectives.org/newfiles/joh_frame/PT.Frame.EVR.2.pdf

The post-Chalcedonian schism, however, is a more difficult issue. I do believe that the Council was expressing an important biblical truth. At the same time, their operative language was philosophical rather than scriptural. In my view, philosophical language is not necessarily a wrong means of expressing theological truth, but it tends to raise as many questions as it answers. The Council said that Jesus is "one person in two natures;" but what, precisely, is a "person?" What is a "nature?" How should we interpret the "one person" so as not to compromise the "two natures," and vice versa? The answers are not obvious. Lutherans and Calvinists later accused one another of different sorts of failure to do justice to Chalcedon, and that debate continues to the present, with intelligent, learned and godly thinkers on both sides. Is this issue really designed by God to be a test of orthodoxy?

At any rate, there is much more to be said here. My reason for bringing this up is because the existence of these "eastern" churches definitely shifts the center of gravity of the early church far, far away from Rome. Rome likes to begin with Peter, and on and on; now they are claiming "development" of the papacy (officially, this is so). The sheer size of the "churches of asia" which paid absolutely no mind to Peter and Rome make Rome's claims to authority in the early church look both boastful and provincial.