I look around our church and most of our members (over 2,000) are women and children because our men have been killed or kidnapped. All of our members apart from me are Iraqis and all have suffered terribly. Last year alone, 93 of my people were killed. This year already, five of my people have been killed. All of my original church leaders were killed in 2005 and all Christians in the country who had the means have left and gone to Jordan, Syria or Sweden so that those left behind tend to be the poorer members of the community.
[…]
Hundreds of Christians have been killed, forced to convert or made to pay jezerah tax. On the whole people have not even heard of these problems. I stand in church each week and look at the widows and children without parents. They are my people and I have to provide for them. There is no social security, they need food, clothes and healthcare. They have no money so we have to provide it. I thank G-d that by his grace through our supporters, I have always been able to do this. I might be an Anglican but we do not just give to our own we also give to the Assyrian, Armenian, Chaldean, Syrian Orthodox and to some of the Protestant groups. What we can give though is minuscule compared to the extent of the needs.

Christians have been in Iraq for almost 2000 years, but today they are an imperiled minority.

Judges said Turkey had breached the European Convention on Human Rights by barring the foundation from registering its title to a church and surrounding lands on the Aegean island of Bozcaada, a statement from the court said.

It is the latest ruling by the Strasbourg-based court against Turkey for violating the property rights of its ethnic Greek minority. The European Union, which Turkey seeks to join, has called on the government to return seized properties to minorities and expand their religious and cultural freedoms.
[…]
Turkish courts had ruled against the foundation because it had missed an initial deadline to re-register its deed and had ordered the property be turned over to the state Treasury.

This is the latest of several ECHR judgments against Turkey for violating property rights of Greek Orthodox foundations.  Many more similar cases are still pending.

The church was forced to retreat to remote mountainous regions and borderlands, where small and insular Christian communities endured for centuries. For example, the Christian territories of Armenia and Georgia survived in the Caucusus, while Maronite Christians found refuge in the mountains of Lebanon.

As Philip Jenkins describes in The Lost History of Christianity, modern technology and the rise of the nation-state contributed to the final decline of many such isolated Christian communities.

[P]recisely the conditions that allowed Christian survival proved deadly dangerous with the emergence of modern states that sought to control their entire territory, and had no patience for the tolerance previously granted to dissident regions. Early modern states could tolerate minorities only within remote enclaves where the writ of government barely ran; but exactly those features made the existence of those enclaves intolerable to modern nation-states. Around the world, nineteenth- and twentieth-century states expanded their authority through military conscription, through censuses, and through compulsory education, making it ever harder to hide from authority. Railroads and newspapers, telegraphs and telephones, carried national standards into the farthest reaches of the land. In practice, the czar or sultan never could be kept away, and that development would be critical for minority survival. With a growing sense of national identity, reinforced by grave external dangers, the Ottoman and later Turkish regimes were deeply sensitive to minority regions that might well seek to break away.

In these circumstances, enclaves located near borders looked dangerously inviting for potential invaders. Furthermore, once the decision had been made to eliminate a troublesome community, the new technologies made it easier to send orders to local authorities, to ensure they were obeyed, and to supply the means for mass murder. Although not as central as they would later be in the Nazi genocide, railroads were an important weapon for the Turkish ethnic cleansings after 1915. New forms of transportation contributed to the spread of Muslim militancy by allowing Muslims to travel widely by train and steamship, to share ideas: the multimillion-strong crowds of pilgrims flocking to Mecca are a strictly modern phenomenon. Such wide travel encourages the creation of Pan-Islamic ideologies. Moreover, a fire-breathing sermon preached in Cairo or Constantinople could within days have grim practical consequences for Christians hundreds of miles away. In this new world, not only did the factors that once protected Christians cease to matter; they even invited official intervention. There was no place left to hide. [Quoted from pp. 240-41, emphasis added]

Modern technology fostered the rise of the modern nation-state, which brought the capability for uniform administration of justice across wider territories—but it also enabled uniform administration of injustice as nationalist regimes were able to wipe out “traitorous” groups within their borders. Thus did Turkey cleanse its territory of religious and ethnic minorities during the 20th century.

[T]he future of the monastery and the Christian minority is threatened by a series of lawsuits against the monks and the prestigious religious institution. In August of 2008, the leaders of three Muslim villages around the monastery accused the community of proselytism, for having students to whom they can hand down the Christian faith and the Aramaic language. Their case has not yet been accepted by the Turkish court. But the village leaders are also asking that the monastery’s land be appropriated and divided among the villages; that a wall be knocked down that was built during the 1990′s (when the monastery was on the front of the conflict between the Turkish army and the Kurdish communist party (PKK)). According to the Muslim leaders, there used to be a mosque on the land where the monastery was built. “The accusation is absurd,” says David Gelen, leader of the Aramaic Foundation, “the monastery dates from 397 A.D., about 200 years before the prophet Mohammed and the construction of any mosque whatsoever. And yet the court has considered hearing the case.”

In the 1960s, about 130,000 Syriac Christians lived in Tur Abdin. Intimidation and persecution have caused most to flee to Europe. Today, only some 3,000 remain.

Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom sees the monastery as an example of the Muslim world’s increasing religious intolerance.

“An ideology of extreme intolerance is sweeping the Muslim world today. Even moderate Western allies, such as Turkey and Iraq, have turned an unwelcoming, indeed hostile, face to the Christians and other non-Muslims in their midst and driving them out. This is a problem, not only for the ancient churches but for Western geopolitics. It is an ideology of religious intolerance that undergirds jihadism. All of our leaders — East and West — need to recognize this and work to end it.”

Assyrian International News Agency has regular updates on the progress of the lawsuits, as well as a page of beautiful photographs of the monastery, whence the photo below.

“Sleep Lord Jesus, sleep,” Aleksei Dozenko sings, picking up the melody of a Christmas carol that had floated in the consciousness of Orthodox Russia long before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 drove the church underground.

The seven-and-a-half-year-old Dozenko is one of a new generation of children being brought up again in the time-honored traditions of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

After 70 years in the wilderness, the rhythms and festivals of the Eastern Rite and Orthodox churches are reclaiming their place at the heart of the culture and life of Russia, Ukraine, and elsewhere.

When the Soviet Union collapsed after decades of state-sponsored atheism, the Russian church appeared moribund. Now the faith is reviving as young people return to the beliefs and traditions of their parents and grandparents.

I join Canada’s Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, the Hon Jason Kenney, in wishing a blessed and joyous Christmas to Eastern Rite and Orthodox Christians.

Philip Jenkins, author of The Lost History of Christianity, outlines the story in Christianity Today online.

[U]nderstanding the history of Iraq’s churches should make us still more keenly aware of the tragedy we see unfolding. Not only are these churches — Chaldean, Assyrian, Orthodox — truly ancient, they are survivals from the earliest history of the church. For centuries indeed, the land long known as Mesopotamia had a solid claim to rank as the center of the church and an astonishing record of missions and evangelism. What we see today in Iraq is not just the death of a church, but also the end of one of the most awe-inspiring phases of Christian history.
[…]
When the Roman Empire became Christian, Mesopotamia became the main refuge for those theological currents that the empire now labeled heretical: the Monophysites or Jacobites, and the Nestorians. Ultimately, most of the Christians of modern Iraq look to one of these movements as their spiritual ancestor.
[…]
These Mesopotamian monasteries were also the base camps for one of the greatest missionary enterprises in Christian history. Especially between the 7th and 9th centuries, the Church of the East was establishing bishoprics and metropolitans across Asia — through Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, into Tibet and Kyrgyzstan, and as far as India and China.

Looking at the world in 850 or so, few observers would have doubted that the Christian future lay in the Middle East and Asia, rather than in the barbarian-ravaged lands of Western Europe.

But it was not to be. Muslims began systematically persecuting Christians in the 13th and 14th centuries, obliterating the church across the Middle East and Central Asia. That persecution has continued to the present day, even intensifying during the 20th century, thus bringing us to what appears to be the impending destruction of Christianity in Iraq.

h/t: Sanctus

Only then were leaders of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, with the indispensable aid of imperial authority, able to root out teachings and texts deemed threatening to church order and stability.  Given the opportunity, they ruthlessly suppressed alternative scriptures containing Gnostic, proto-feminist, egalitarian, or other subversive accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching.

In The Lost History of Christianity, Philip Jenkins shows that this view doesn’t make sense by looking at ancient texts of the Syriac-speaking Church, which came into existence in the Middle East soon after Christ’s resurrection.

An Assyrian Christian named Tatian, a disciple of Justin Martyr for many years, wrote a book around AD 170 that became an authoritative text in the Syriac Church.  The Diatessaron of Tatian, the first harmony of the four canonical gospels, was popularly accepted as the Gospel text until a complete Syriac Bible with Old and New Testaments was translated and compiled.  This was the Peshitta, which was completed in the early 5th century and remains the authorised version in Syriac churches (both Nestorian and Monophysite) to this day.

The Diatessaron and the Peshitta speak decisively against the claim that the early church accepted numerous contradictory texts written by putative apostolic authors.

The problem with all this is that the Eastern churches had a long familiarity with the rival scriptures, but rejected them because they knew they were late and tendentious. Even as early as the second century, the Diatessaron assumes four, and only four, authentic Gospels. Throughout the Middle Ages, neither Nestorians nor Jacobites [Monophysites] were under any coercion from the Roman/Byzantine Empire or church, and had they wished, they could have included in the canon any alternative Gospels or scriptures they wanted to. But instead of adding to the canon, they chose to prune. The Syriac Bible omits several books that are included in the West (2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and the book of Revelation). Scholars like Isho’dad wanted to carry the purge further, and did not feel that any of the Catholic Epistles could seriously claim apostolic authorship. The only extraneous text that a few authorities wished to include was the Diatessaron itself. The deep conservatism of these churches, so far I removed from papal or imperial control, makes nonsense of claims that the church bureaucracy allied with empire to suppress unpleasant truths about Christian origins.

Although they did not include them in the canon of scripture, all the Eastern churches knew many ancient Christian texts, including apocryphal Gospels and apocalypses, and many scholars quote from now-lost patristic texts and commentaries.

(Footnotes omitted, quoted from p. 88.)

Isho’dad of Merv (in present-day Turkmenistan) was a ninth-century Nestorian bishop and Bible scholar.

That Eastern churches were familiar with alternative accounts of Jesus and his teachings is further corroborated by the fact that the Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945 are in Coptic, the language of Egyptian Christians.

I reviewed The Lost History of Christianity here.

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.