Nestor i ans

(nès-to're-anz.) (Eccl. Hist.) A religious sect which arose in the first half of the 5th cent, and followed the doctrines advanced by Nestor i us, Patriarch of Constantinople. He carefully distinguished the two natures of Christ, but affirmed that the human nature was not inhabited by the divine, as a temple by its divinity. He a erted that the Virgin was merely the mother of Christ or man, and could not be styled the mother of God, seeing that God could neither be born nor die. This heterodoxy was resolutely opposed by St. Cyril, Bishop of Alexandria, and condemned by succe ive councils, one of which, held at Ephesus in 431,deprived Nestor i us of his episcopate as having been guilty of blasphemy, and he D. an exile in Upper Egypt. His opinions, however, had taken deep root throughout W. Asia, and Nestor i ans are still numerous in the mountain-ranges of Kurdistan. [s. 638]