Theodore of Mopsuestia as the Authoritative Interpreter of Scripture

The Church of the East knows Theodore of Mopsuestia, who died in 428, simply as Mpashqana, the Interpreter, a title given without further qualification because no other figure is held to require the distinction. The Church of the East: An Illustrated History of Assyrian Christianity records that Theodore's Antiochene method of exegesis, historical and literal in its approach to scripture rather than allegorical in the manner favored by the rival school at Alexandria, became the normative method of biblical interpretation across the whole of East Syriac Christianity, shaping how generations of the church's scholars read and taught the text long after Theodore's own death. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church notes that Theodore's influence reached well beyond exegesis alone, since his christological vocabulary, distinguishing the divine and human natures in Christ with a precision his critics later read as excessive, underlies the two qnome formula that the Church of the East continues to confess as its own account of the incarnation, making Theodore not merely a respected commentator within the tradition but one of the formative sources of its distinctive theological language.

More than a century after Theodore's death, the Second Council of Constantinople condemned him by name in 553, in the affair remembered as the Three Chapters controversy, retroactively anathematizing a teacher whose own writings had been read as broadly acceptable, and in some quarters celebrated, during his own lifetime. The "Nestorian" Church: A Lamentable Misnomer records that the Church of the East neither received this council nor accepted its condemnation, continuing to honor Theodore as Mpashqana precisely because the council that anathematized him belongs to a conciliar tradition the Church of the East had already separated from more than a century earlier, at the time of Ephesus in 431, and so carries no binding authority over it. The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine situates the posthumous condemnation within a wider pattern in which later theological disputes reshaped how earlier, more ambiguous figures came to be read, Theodore's own writings interpreted retrospectively through controversies that arose only after his death. A father honored without reservation by one church and formally anathematized by another stands as one of the sharpest and most concrete markers of the division between the two conciliar traditions.