Nova Scotia Scott

For well over a thousand years, the world of Christianity looked something like this map, a flower with three petals—Africa, Asia, Europe—centred around Jerusalem. Not until around 1500 did Christianity and Europe become synonymous: Christianity became essentially European and Europe essentially Christian. Before then, the Christian church survived and flourished in Egypt and Ethiopia and from Asia Minor to India and even China.

Christianity became European only because churches in Africa and Asia were shattered or destroyed.  About 500 years ago, two-thirds of the Christian world was virtually wiped out.

The rise and fall of the African and Asian churches is the subject of The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died, the latest book by one of today’s leading historians of religion, Philip Jenkins.

The book opened my eyes to an intriguing and gripping history of Christians who built a great culture and held wide influence across a vast territory encompassing many lands with a diversity of peoples, languages, and religions. Anyone with an interest in Christian history would find it fascinating. The book is well written, thoroughly researched, and extensively documented. It is at the same time scholarly and accessible—popular history at its best, in my view.

Why have these Christians been forgotten?  One reason is theological: They subscribed to doctrines concerning the Person of Christ that were judged heretical during the fifth century. Christians in Mesopotamia, Persia, and farther east followed the teachings of the Patriarch Nestorius, which were rejected at the First Council of Ephesus (431). Christians in Africa and much of the Middle East and Asia Minor tended to be Monophysites, who rejected the Christological statement of the Council of Chalcedon (451). Both Nestorians and Monophysites were orthodox according to the fourth-century Nicene Creed, but later controversies split them off from the Catholic and Orthodox branches of the Christian church.

They were also cut off by language. Middle Eastern Christians generally spoke Syriac, a language very closely related to the Aramaic of Jesus and his first disciples. Latin and Greek, of course, were the languages of the churches centred in Rome and Constantinople.

At one time, the Nestorian and Monophysite churches were apparently greater in size and influence than Western churches. Consider Timothy I of Baghdad, patriarch of the (Nestorian) East Syrian Church from 780, about whom Jenkins writes:

At every stage, Timothy’s career violates everything we think we know about the history of Christianity—about its geographical spread, its relationship with political state power, its cultural breadth, and its interaction with other religions. In terms of his prestige, and the geographical extent of his authority, Timothy was arguably the most significant Christian spiritual leader of his day, much more influential than the Western pope, in Rome, and on a par with the Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople. Perhaps a quarter of the world’s Christians looked to Timothy as both spiritual and political head. At least as much as the Western pope, he could claim to head the successor of the ancient apostolic church.
[...]
To appreciate the scale of the Church of the East, we can look at a list of the church’s metropolitans—that is, of those senior clergy who oversaw inferior hierarchies of bishops grouped in provinces. In England, to give a comparison, the medieval church had two metropolitans: respectively, at York and Canterbury. Timothy himself presided over nineteen metropolitans and eighty-five bishops.
[...]
The presence of metropolitan seats in Turkestan and central Asia is amazing enough, but the list of bishoprics and lesser churches includes just as many shocks: Arabia had at least four sees, and Timothy created a new one in Yemen. And the church was growing in southern India, where believers claimed a direct inheritance from the missions of the apostle Thomas.
[...]
Timothy himself was committed to the church’s further expansion, and he commissioned monks to carry the faith to the shores of the Caspian Sea, even into China. He reported the conversion of the Turkish great king, the khagan, who then ruled over much of central Asia. In a magnificent throwaway line, Timothy described, about 780, how “[i]n these days the Holy Spirit has anointed a metropolitan for the Turks, and we are preparing to consecrate another one for the Tibetans.”

(Footnote omitted, quoted from pp. 6-11)

Although subject to legal discrimination and sporadic persecution, African and Asian Christians generally lived peacefully under Muslims who had conquered most of these territories in the 7th century. However, the Nestorian and Monophysite churches were decimated by a combination of adverse events in the 14th century: violence and political intrigues surrounding the Mongol and Turkish invasions, crop failures due to changing climate, and the Black Plague. Worst of all, says Jenkins, a wide-ranging and sustained campaign of persecution by Islamic rulers brought the church to its knees across the Middle East and Asia.

Persecution of remaining Christians continued for centuries, peaking in the 19th and 20th centuries. In Jenkins’s view, the Ottoman Turks bear particular responsibility during this time period. Their xenophobic nationalism gave rise to extensive ethnic and religious cleansing directed against Monophysite and Orthodox Christians.

This thought-provoking book opens up a forgotten era of Christianity and tells a story that Western Christians need to hear.

Tags: Christian history, Eastern Christianity, Monophysitism, Nestorianism, Philip Jenkins, Western civilisation