Justinian's Bid to Settle the Three Chapters

By the middle of the sixth century, the Christological settlement reached at Chalcedon in 451 had failed to hold the church together. Miaphysite Christians, concentrated in Egypt, Syria and Armenia, rejected Chalcedon's formula of two natures in one person as a concession to Nestorianism, the condemned teaching that divided Christ into two separate persons, divine and human. Justinian, ruling an empire that still contained large Miaphysite populations he needed to reconcile, sought a way to affirm Chalcedon while distancing it from anything that could be read as Nestorian.

His solution was to condemn three specific bodies of writing, the so called Three Chapters: the person and work of Theodore of Mopsuestia, a theologian whose language on Christ's two natures Miaphysites read as crypto-Nestorian; certain polemical writings of Theodoret of Cyrus directed against Cyril of Alexandria, the Miaphysites' own theological authority; and a letter attributed to Ibas of Edessa that likewise drew Miaphysite objection. None of the three had been condemned at Chalcedon itself, so Justinian reasoned that removing them would strip away exactly the material Miaphysites found objectionable without touching Chalcedon's own decrees.