Talk:Prester John

Neutrality check:

I have nominated this article to be checked for neutrality. The reason was given in the summary, but the tag was soon removed again, cont rary to policy, by another editor, on the pretext that I needed to give a reason on the talk page. So here is the same explanation again, from my edit summary:

This article clearly has a point-of-view, but it's not a very neutral one, it represents only one opinion and scorns others

According to my understanding, it is not considered helpful to remove neutrality concern tags, when an editor raises neutrality concerns. If an editor raises neutrality concerns, it means there is a neutrality concern that needs to be worked out. If another editor then summarily removes the tag, it looks like that editor is assuming he is above all others, "owns" the article, and alone knows what is best. That is exactly why the policy says not to remove those tags UNTIL the neutrality issue is addressed to everyone's satisfaction. Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 17:58, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

Calm down. I removed the tag because your edit summary was extremely vague as to the reasons why you added it, and you did not explain yourself on the talk page. Placing NPOV tags without appropriate explanation is not helpful to improving an article, and I know of no policy (or guideline) indicating that inappropriately placed tags must be left in place. What point of view does this article have? What is the "one opinion" represented here? What others does it "scorn"? Virtually every statement here is cited to reliable sources, and most of it is just an account of the various incarnations of the legend through the years. You'll have to elaborate.--Cúchullain ^t/c 18:16, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

I admit that I was also puzzled by the tag. Would you please explain as specifically as possible your concerns about the neutrality of the article. Aramgar (talk) 19:17, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

I'm still newish here, but as near as I can tell, there's no way to do a POV check without Til Eulenspiegel describing the POV problem? Cretog8 (talk) 18:16, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

There's no way to address his concerns if he doesn't tell us what they are. Placing a template like that is useless without discussion.--Cúchullain ^t/c 19:33, 6 June 2008 (UTC)

GA Reassessment

This discussion is transcluded from Talk:Prester John/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the reassessment.

GA Sweeps: Kept

As part of the WikiProject Good Articles, we're doing Sweeps to go over all of the current GAs and see if they still meet the GA criteria. I went through the article and made various changes, please look them over. I believe the article currently meets the criteria and should remain listed as a Good Article. Altogether the article is well-written and is still in great shape after its passing in 2006. Continue to improve the article making sure all new information is properly sourced and neutral. I would recommend sourcing the following statements: "He told Otto, in the presence of the pope, that Prester John, a Nestorian Christian who served in the dual position of priest and king, had regained the city of Ecbatana from the brother monarchs of Medes and Persia, the Samiardi, in a great battle "not many years ago."" and "Perhaps due to Buchan's work, Prester John appeared in pulp fiction and comics throughout the century." (don't want to risk OR; if source can't be found then reword). It would be beneficial to update the access dates for all of the online sources. If you have any questions, let me know on my talk page and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. I have updated the article history to reflect this review. --Happy editing! Nehrams2020 (talk • contrib) 01:27, 17 June 2009 (UTC)

Assyrian / Nestorian

Hi, I tagged one of the sentences as needing a citation. This is because I've been doing quite a bit of cleanup on some other "Christianity in Asia" articles, and have found several places where someone seems to have done a global search & replace, swapping "Nestorian" for "Assyrian Church of the East". In one place they even changed a quote from a source, to say "Assyrian" instead of "Nestorian", even though the "Assyrian" term doesn't appear anywhere in the book! So I'm trying to do a big sweep and get things set right. I see that other sentences in that paragraph are referenced to a book by Silverberg. I don't have that source handy, but when I checked it via Google Books, I was told that the term "Assyrian Church of the East" does not appear in the book anywhere, which is why I've tagged the sentence. Can anyone who does have the source, verify the usage of the name? Or if it's true that it's not in the book, and we can't find some other reliable source, let's please pull that sentence. Thanks, --Elonka 02:30, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Silverberg does not use the name Assyrian Church of the East (he just uses "Nestorian"), but that's clearly what he's talking about: the Christian church called the "Nestorians" in the medieval West. It matters in this case since for whatever reason, Wikipedia has two articles, one on the early heresy of Nestorius, which is titled Nestorianism, and one on the church known as "Nestorian" to medieval Europeans, here titled Assyrian Church of the East. Just linking to Nestorianism will not take the reader to appropriate article. The other common name for the church, Church of the East, is a dab page directing the reader to "Assyrian Church of the East" and several other churches. Can you suggest a better way of addressing this problem?--Cúchullain ^t/c 19:27, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Hi, happy to work with you to try and come up with a consensus version.  :) To move forward, could you explain more about why do you feel that the article on Nestorianism wouldn't work? I've recently given it an overhaul, so it might address things better now. My own opinion for the easiest fix as far as the Prester John article might be to simply quote what Silverberg says, and leave it at that. --Elonka 20:11, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Oh, I hadn't seen your much-needed work at Nestorianism. The article formerly focused on Nestorianism as a doctrine (the Nestorian heresy), while discussion of the actual "Nestorian church" and its activities in the Middle Ages was located at the article "Assyrian Church of the East". My only desire in terms of this article is for readers being told about a medieval church to be linked to the article discussing that church, and not to an article about a doctrine with a fairly opaque connection to the later church. If the Nestorianism article is made into such an article, then I'm fine with just linking to Nestorianism and being done with it. The problems among our articles on Nestorianism and Church of the East is something to be dealt with elsewhere; hopefully it will be worked out effectively.--Cúchullain ^t/c 21:06, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

I've made an amendment, but kept a link to the Church of the East, since that article contains a lot of relevant information. What do you think?--Cúchullain ^t/c 21:12, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Hmm, I'm reluctant to link anything about Prester John to the Assyrian Church of the East unless we have an actual reliable source which makes this connection. I've gone ahead and edited the paragraph a bit to something I like better. Feel free to keep tweaking, and maybe we can circle in on consensus that way.  :) --Elonka 21:26, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

(followup) In looking at the Assyrian Church of the East article, I'm seeing several statements which look like straight copy/pastes of incorrect sections from other articles as well. It's looking like sometime over the past couple years, someone went through several articles on Wikipedia and made a concerted copy/paste effort to replace "Nestorian" with "Assyrian Church of the East" in several locations. Or in other words, in trying to find out what the actual historic reality is, please don't rely on Wikipedia articles... We're going to need to actually produce reliable secondary sources to get things straightened out. --Elonka 21:41, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Yes, quite so... It does seem to be a pretty substantial problem across the board. I don't know how much help I could be in terms of a wider solution, but it seems to me that the article on "Nestorianism" should contain information on the Nestorian Christianity; if we need a separate article on the Nestorian doctrine, it should go elsewhere, perhaps Nestorianism (doctrine), Nestorian heresy, or something like that. --Cúchullain ^t/c 21:52, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

This is also made more complicated because there is also a lengthy, really annoying edit war all over Wikipedia about whether to use "Syriac", "Assyrian", "Chaldean", or "Nestorian" to refer to (what I would call) Syriac Christians. Good luck with that :) Adam Bishop (talk) 23:57, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

Hi Adam! And yes, I've been seeing remnants of it as I've been trying to cleanup the Nestorian-related articles... What are your own favorite sources on the issue? --Elonka 04:18, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

I don't know, I don't really have any, so I've tried to stay out of this dispute (aside from stopping edit wars occasionally). Personally, I've only ever met people who identified as "Assyrian", and for my own work, they are called Syrians or Jacobites, but that is a narrow time and place and not really the same thing. I know I've read about the Mongols being Nestorians, so I assume that "Assyrian" means a group that stayed in the Near East, and Nestorians were a group that moved further east. Adam Bishop (talk) 09:17, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

This seems to be quite a wide reaching problem (read: clusterfuck). But anyway, under whatever title, we need a good base article for discussing all related "Nestorian" groups. From what I can tell Adam is right that the surviving church variously known as the "Church of the East", the "Persian Church", and the "Assyrian Church (of the East)" is the branch of the wider Nestorian movement now existing mainly in the Middle East. As such it's hardly the best place to discuss the pan-Asian Nestorian Christian sect. Britannica discusses this under "Nestorian (Christian sect)"; though this may have its own problems, it seems like the most reasonable course.--Cúchullain ^t/c 15:23, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

My own general impression is that most of the reliable sources refer to the medieval term as "Nestorian". However, there is this modern Assyrian Church of the East that identifies as Nestorian, so my guess is that there are some modern-day church members who feel that since they have the "Nestorian" name, that they can then claim credit for everything that happened under that name. So they're going through and trying to nail it down in all the historical articles and make clear that it's "Assyrian" not "Nestorian" (I even saw one spot where they changed a quote from Runciman to make it look like he said Assyrian instead of Nestorian!). Anyway, I think the Nestorianism article is as good a place as any to try and collect all the information. I was working on the Assyrian Church of the East in China article yesterday, which seems to be effectively about Nestorianism, so perhaps we should merge that article into Nestorianism? It looks like there was at one time a Nestorianism in China article, but it ran afoul of the Assyrian camp, an effective duplicate was created as Assyrian Church of the East in China, and then someone set the Nestorianism in China article as a redirect to the Assyrian article! My recommendation is we change things back:

• Anything that has sources which specifically refer to the Assyrian Church of the East, we put in the Assyrian Church of the East article
• Everything else gets put in the Nestorianism article
• If the Nestorianism article gets too big, we split off a Nestorianism in Medieval Asia or History of Nestorianism in Asia article
• In the Nestorianism article, we include a section on "Modern Nestorianism", which has a {{main}} link to the Assyrian Church of the East article.

How's that sound? --Elonka 16:13, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Sounds great. Shall we move the discussion to Talk:Nestorianism?--Cúchullain ^t/c 16:21, 27 January 2010 (UTC)

Works for me.  :) --Elonka 02:05, 28 January 2010 (UTC)

Prester John in India?

It comes as a complete surprise to me to find that Prester John was ever associated with India. I thought he was always reckoned to live somewhere in central Asia, to the east of Persia. I can't find a citation in this article quoting a source for his alleged connection with India, and I would be very interested to see one. I hope it's more than just one of the many dubious traditions of the Saint Thomas Christians.

Djwilms (talk) 06:27, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

The localization in India (or the "Three Indias") came to a head with the Letter of Prester John; there are several sources given in that section, but you can find translations and different versions in a few places online (for example the Welsh one is here) Prior to that there were two associated texts, only briefly mentioned here, that describe an archbishop or patriarch (not a king, but in one he's specifically named John) coming from the "Shrine of Saint Thomas" in India to the West. Otto of Freising does not localize Prester John, and with the coming of the Mongols, he was often associated with Central Asia (and sometimes specifically identified with Wang Khan), but some later writers maintained the old connection with India (John of Mandeville, John of Hildesheim, and Wolfram von Eschenbach). Later still, Prester John was relocated to Ethiopia. Hope that helps.--Cúchullain ^t/c 15:32, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Well well, one lives and learns. So it's one of the many dubious traditions of the western churches instead. My apologies to the Saint Thomas Christians. Much obliged for that fascinating information.

Djwilms (talk) 01:45, 5 March 2010 (UTC)