52 HORMUZD RASSAM, ESQ., ON BIBLICAL LANDS, THEIE 



The sect was new, as the office Avas created for it. Converts 

 to Popery from the Nestorians and Jacobite clnirches were 

 nnited in one body and dignified by the name of the 

 Chaldean Church. It means no more than Papal Syrians, as 

 we have in other parts Papal Armenians and Papal Greeks." 

 This is certainly a wild idea, seeing that the term Greeks 

 and Armenians mean nationalities, whereas " Nestorian " is 

 neither more nor less than a religions title. Any people 

 joining a sect would be called, as a matter of course, by the 

 denomination they have allied themselves with, like English 

 Lutherans and German Lutherans, and if the Chaldeans 

 were not called by that appellation before, what was their 

 nationality then, unless Messrs. Smith and Dwight meant to 

 prove that the Chaldeans were descendants of Nestorius? 

 If those two writers had taken the trouble to study the 

 Mesopotamian and Assjaian nationalities, and what the word 

 "Nestorian " meant, they would have found the JVcstoricws 

 and Syrians, whether Catholic or Monophysites, were separate 

 sects, each having rituals of their own. Moreover, had they 

 gone to head-quarters, they would have found at the 

 Vatican documents extant wherein the Chaldeans were 

 called by Paul V heretics more than seventy years before 

 the date they quote, and it is a folly to suppose that the 

 Roman Pontiff could or would create a national name of 

 Chaldeans for a people like the natives of Diarbekir, who were 

 not living in either Chaldea or Assyria, to say nothing about 

 the converted Nestorians and Jacobites having no nation- 

 alities at all. To show how groundless these assertions are, 

 I produce here Avhat Assemani the Syrian historian says in 

 contradiction. In vol. iv, j)age 75, he remarks that 

 '' Paul V," the seventh Pope before Innocent X, to whom 

 Messrs. Smith and Dwight refer as having given the name 

 of Chaldeans to the Nestorians, " wrote to Elias the Patriarch 

 of the Chaldeans (who was then a Nestorian) thus — 'A great 

 part of the East Avas infected by this heresy of Nestorius, 

 especially the Chaldeans, Avho for this reason have been 

 called Nestorians." In the same volume, page 1, Assemani 

 states " that the Chaldeans, or Assyrians, are called Orientals 

 trom that part of the globe which they inhabit, and 

 Nestorians from the heresy they profess." 



The late Rev. G. P. Badger also followed the footsteps of 

 Messrs. Smith and Dwight in their capricious idea about the 

 origin of the Chaldeans. He says in his Nestorians and their 

 Rituals (vol. i, page 180), "that when the Latin missionaries 



