Alex Jurado: Voice of Nestorius

In a recent YouTube video, Catholic apologist Alex Jurado (a.k.a. Voice of Reason) argued that Nestorius of Constantinople was not a heretic.

During an interview with Emmanuel Romanous—a YouTuber and member of the Assyrian Church of the East—Jurado described the Council of Ephesus as “a huge, terrible, awful misunderstanding.”

Why? Because, according to Jurado, “Nestorius was not a Nestorian.”

In other words, Nestorius did not adhere to the heresy which the Council of Ephesus condemned as “Nestorianism.”

Jurado acknowledges that the definitions of Ephesus are Orthodox. In other words, he does not side with Nestorius against the Council.

Rather, he believes that Nestorius and the Council were in full agreement. They simply misunderstood one another.

Jurado admits that his theory makes him unpopular online. Romanous asks why; Jurado then expresses his view that most people have “a faulty, false, incorrect understanding of the competency of [Ecumenical] Councils.”

Jurado goes on to explain his theory:

Ecumenical Councils are infallible when they’re teaching the Faith. Whenever Ecumenical Councils are teaching something that is in the Apostolic Deposit of Faith—which is what Jesus Christ revealed to the Apostles—when Ecumenical Councils are teaching the Faith, they are infallible... But here’s the thing. Ecumenical Councils can be wrong when they’re not defining matters of Faith. They can be wrong in other things.

Here’s how Jurado applies this to Ephesus:

The Church correctly taught the Faith at the Council of Ephesus. But what they got wrong was that they misrepresented what Nestorius believed. The Church itself then rightly condemned the heresy—because everyone here believes that Nestorianism is a heresy, and that’s true! But the problem is that they said, “That guy Nestorius, he believes it.” And that’s what was false.

Jurado goes on to say that the (Eastern) Orthodox dislike him because we hold to an error he calls “conciliar fundamentalism”. That is, we deny that the Ecumenical Council could have erred in condemning Nestorius personally.

This is absurd, for three reasons.

First of all, Jurado’s dichotomy is a pure novelty. No one has ever made this distinction between Councils being infallible in “matters of faith” vs. “matters of fact.” It’s something he made up, in order to massage the Church’s condemnation of Nestorius.

What’s funny is that, when Romanous asks Jurado where he’s getting this distinction from, Jurado can’t even begin to answer. He simply restates his own position:

The Ecumenical Councils themselves over the last 2,000 years, the theologians explain the competency of Ecumenical Councils—or when bishops gather to teach the universal Church. They say, “Remember, bishops, when they come together and teach together, they’re only infallible whenever they’re teaching what’s in the deposit of faith.” What that means, though, is that they can make mistakes in other things.

Secondly, Nestorius was a Nestorian. He was given every opportunity to affirm the orthodox, catholic Christology taught by St. Cyril of Alexandria. But he did not. In fact, he said that St. Cyril bore the “mark of those whose minds are led astray... by Greek thinking or are sick with the lunacy of Apollinarius and Arius or the other heresies or rather something more serious than these.” In other words, he said that St. Cyril was something worse than an Arian!

Cyril and Nestorius exchanged five lengthy and learned letters. Each understood the other’s position quite thoroughly. And each concluded that the other was a heretic. This was made clear during the Council itself, where Nestorius and his allies persisted in condemning the orthodox party—and were, in turn, condemned by the Church.

Does Jurado really believe that he is smarter than everyone at the Council of Ephesus—both the Cyrillians and the Nestorians? Is he able to divine a deeper agreement which alluded the best theological minds of the fifth century?

Nestorius insisted that we cannot say things like “Mary is the mother of God,” or “God was three months old.” He defended this position in his exhaustive debates with Cyril and on the floor of the Third Ecumenical Council. Why did he do this? Because he believed in a radical separation between Christ’s human and divine natures—the exact (heretical) position attributed to him by the Ephesian Fathers and the pages of history.

Thirdly, Nestorius was not merely condemned as a heretic. He was also anathematized and expelled from the Church. Even if the debate between Nestorius and Cyril was simply a misunderstanding (which, again, it wasn’t), the fact still remains: The Council of Ephesus demanded Nestorius assent to certain orthodox definitions and formulae under pain of excommunication; he withheld his assent and was therefore excommunicated.

Does Jurado reject Nestorius’s excommunication? Then he denies the Office of the Keys—the Church’s authority to bind and loose, to excommunicate and reconcile.

Again, at this point, it doesn’t matter if Nestorius simply misunderstood the Cyrillian position. The magisterial Church ordered him to affirm certain Orthodox definitions, and he refused. There is no excuse for disregarding the Church’s authority in this way. It would be like saying that Martin Luther wasn’t really excommunicated because he thought he was right.

In short: if Nestorius was not excommunicated, then no one has ever been excommunicated.

This is the third or fourth article I’ve written about Jurado and his strange obsession with rehabilitating Nestorius. And for the record, there are many, many things I would rather write about. The trouble is that Jurado keeps making this ridiculous and dangerous claim, no matter how many times he is corrected.

It would be nice if we could simply handwave all of the schisms in Church history—to pretend that all the disagreements between Protestants and Catholics and Nestorians and Miaphysites and the Orthodox were just a bunch of unfortunate misunderstandings.

This is simply not the case, however. The less time we waste toying with these dangerous fantasies, the sooner we can begin to seek true unity—one based in a common allegiance to the orthodox, catholic Faith.

Michael W. Davis is general editor of the Union of Orthodox journalists. Follow him on Twitter and Substack.

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