In the early Christian era, Mesopotamia/Iraq was a thriving center of rabbinic Judaism, and throughout the first millennium it was the intellectual capital of that faith. Given the Jewish background, naturally we find very early Christian settlements in Iraq.
Within the Persian empire, the greatest seat of church power was of course at the capital Seleucia-Ctesiphon. The cityâ??s bishop â?? later the patriarch â?? ruled from there until the move to Baghdad in early Islamic times. In northern Iraq, Nisibis, likewise, was critical to both Jewish and Christian scholarship. (See Adam H. Becker, Fear of God and the Beginning of Wisdom: The School of Nisibis and the Development of Scholastic Culture in Late Antique Mesopotamia (2013).
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