Refuge in the Hills…

…and the sidearm….

Instead of trying to understand why religions perish, we should perhaps be asking why they survive at all under such difficult circumstances.

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died, by Philip Jenkins

Jenkins compares the situation in Egypt as opposed to Algeria / Tunisia.  Why did Christianity, via the Copts, continue as a significant minority in the former, and Christianity virtually disappeared in the latter?

This almost immediately after the time when what we know as Algeria and Tunisia today could be considered as much a center of Christian life as any.  Carthage was the source of Latin traditions – at least as much as, if not more than, Rome.  This part of Africa was the home of Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine.  By the late fifth century, North Africa had five or six hundred bishoprics. 

Yet within fifty years of the Arab conquests, Christians could scarcely be found: local Muslim rulers apologized to the caliphs that they could no longer provide Christian slaves, as almost none could be found.  There were gaps of decades and even centuries in many bishoprics.  From the 1,500 miles of coastline spreading from the western side of Egypt to the Atlantic, North Africa had almost zero Christian presence. 

Jenkins points to the failures of the Christian Church in spreading beyond the major cities of this region; the world of native peoples was almost untouched, with the church making little progress in taking the faith to the villages and countryside.  There was little effort to translate the Scriptures into the local languages.  One could consider the Christianity of North Africa (excluding Egypt) as the religion of the colonial conquerors.

On the other side, the Copts of Egypt.  Here, the natives were reached.  Even the name Copt is a corruption of the ancient word for native Egyptians.  The hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone were translated by using the liturgies of the Coptic Church!  While the Alexandrians wrote and thought in Greek, Coptic was from the beginning a sophisticated language of Christian literature.

In other words, Christianity was well-engrained in the culture, language, and tradition of the large portion of the Egyptian population.  Even the coming of the Arabic language was not enough to erase this depth.  At the end of the fourteenth century, a Muslim chronicler would complain that the Copts declared that Egypt still belonged to them.

Jenkins takes a look next at Western Europe, and his doing so has strengthened the reality for me that The Battle of Tours in 732 may very well have saved Christianity for the whole of Europe.  At this time, the early to mid-eighth century, it is not as if Christianity was well developed throughout the European population (much like North Africa, as noted above).  Yes, in Italy, Gaul, and the Rhineland, Christianity had developed well.  But what of the north and east?  Germany, the Netherlands, even England.  The ground was shaky at best.

A suggestive story written around 700 tells of English peasants happily watching an immanent shipwreck that was about to claim the lives of some monks.

When they were rebuked by a clergyman, they responded:

“Let no man pray for them, and may God have no mercy on any one of them, for they have robbed men of their old ways of worship, and how the new worship is to be conducted, nobody knows.”

Returning to the original case of Africa, between the fifth and the ninth centuries the sea routes of the Mediterranean shrank in significance relative to the land routes over the Middle East and Central Asia.  Carthage and Antioch would shrink to almost nothing.  Cairo, in the meantime, stood at an important crossroads of these new networks.

Jenkins next turns to the geography of survival, and this section reminds me of one of the earliest reviews I have done of any book: The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, by James C. Scott.  In this book, it was the mountains and borderlands that allowed independence from the emperor in China.  Jenkins will tell a similar story here.

Heading Toward the Grave

When Christian communities are destroyed, they rarely vanish entirely or immediately, and survivors often maintain a clandestine existence for many years afterward.

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died, by Philip Jenkins

The last Christian priests were expelled from Japan in 1650.  Tens of thousands of lay Christians perished; Christian loyalty could lead to death (as a personal note, if you haven’t done so, watch the movie “Silence”).  Japan remained a closed society for the next 200 years.  When Christian missionaries arrived, they were met with a surprise:

…in 1865, a Catholic priest received some surprising visitors.  Nervously, in constant fear of detection, fifteen elderly Japanese peasants wanted to ask him what he knew about the faith they had maintained secretly for so long.

They asked about God, Jesus, and the Blessed Virgin; upon seeing the Madonna and Child, they thought of Christmas.  This story is not unique, as such communities have been found – at times even centuries after the passing of Christian dominance – in China, Turkey, the Balkans, and elsewhere.  Further, remnants from these communities established churches in diaspora lands – this as early as the Syrians in the eighth century and the Greeks in the twelfth. 

Further, in a beloved center of the Shinto religion – the Suwa shrine in Nagasaki – one will find three sacred images, one of which was almost certainly inherited from a destroyed Catholic church that once stood nearby.  The figure is almost certainly a Spanish or Portuguese statue of the Madonna and Child.

Of course, the far more common story is that of takeover – mosques built over churches; churches built over pagan temples.  Back and forth, depending on which side won the last war.  You get the idea. 

Hagia Sophia is the most well-known example, but it is not alone.  The cathedral in Ani was converted to a mosque before it was retaken in 1214; the church of St. Athanasius in Alexandria became a mosque after the Arab conquest.  Cordoba offers many such stories and examples.  Budapest, Cyprus, the Balkans.  The Armenian Cathedral in Edessa remained a fire station until the 1990s, when it was then converted to a mosque.

Jenkins proceeds with an extensive examination of the relationship of Christianity – especially Eastern Christianity – and Islam.  The details of this are outside of the scope of my interest, but fit within his view that despite the overtaking of much of the Christian East by Muslims, the Christian faith influenced Muslim practices and perhaps even the Quran itself – more than commonly understood.

Yet, the momentum and pressure was the other way, of course.  Under Muslim rule, the Christians remained at best, second class citizens; at worst, persecuted until conversion or death.  In the eighteenth century, one Egyptian sheikh would write of the burdens that should be enforced on non-Muslims:

·       they should not be allowed to clothe themselves in costly fabric;

·       they should not be permitted to employ mounts like the Muslims, nor use saddles or stirrups;

·       while in public, they should not be allowed to portray themselves as if they are Muslim;

·       their dwellings should be less than ours, and their building lower;

·       they should walk single file, and step aside in narrow lanes…

Non-Muslims could not testify against Muslims; they could not retaliate or respond against insult.  In nineteenth-century Persia, the Nestorian was not allowed a place at the bazaar; he could not aspire to a trade higher than mason or carpenter.

“The absence of every mark of consideration toward them is obligatory for us…”

The Cleansing

The bloodstained annals of the East contain no record of massacres more unprovoked, more widespread or more terrible than those perpetrated by the Turkish government upon the Christians of Anatolia and Armenia in 1915.

-          James Bryce, the 1^st Viscount Bryce

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died, by Philip Jenkins

This genocide certainly wasn’t the first salvo in the drastic reduction of Christianity in the Middle East and Central Asia, and it hasn’t been the last.  But it is here where Jenkins introduces his chapter: The Last Christians.

Especially in the West, we consider Christianity as revolving around Rome – either for (Catholic), or against (Protestant). The farthest east we go is Constantinople, but these so-called schismatics were swept away by the Ottomans in 1453 – ancient history.  But it is not only here where the persecutions occurred.  Further to the east (and south), all remnants of Christianity were at risk.

Christianity declined in these regions in two major phases.  First, in the Middle Ages, when Christians were reduced to minority status under Muslim rule.  The second, more recent – barely a century old, when Christian communities in these regions almost ceased to exist.  In both phases, the causes were the same and could be summarized: massacre, expulsion, and forced migration. 

At the same time, it cannot be said that the reductions and the actions all ran in a straight line – there were times of relative calm punctuated by events of significant disaster.

The most important force during this time was that of the Ottoman Empire.  After the Mongols destroyed the Seljuk Turk state, the Ottoman Turks began to build and consolidate an empire.  The Balkans, the Black Sea region, and from Persia to Algiers; all under Ottoman rule.  The advances would continue into Hungary, ending only with the Christian victory at Vienna in 1683.

The Ottomans were more aggressively anti-Christian than were the original Arab conquerors of the same lands.  Churches confiscated or razed; countless thousands forcibly converted.  Christian families required to give some number of children to be raised by the state as slaves or elite soldiers.

Then, as the West advanced and trade routes opened up to the East by sea, Western Christians would come into contact with these remnant Christian communities – even as far to the east as China.  But these were hardly seen as “Christian” by the westerners.  For example, in 1723, a French Jesuit would report on the Copts in Egypt:

“…the Copts in Egypt are a strange people far removed from the kingdom of God… scarcely anything human can be detected in them.”

Another Jesuit observer would note of the arrogance of the Ethiopian king, who believed that they were the only true Christians in the world – shunning the Jesuits as heretics for their views on the Virgin Mary.

In the mid-sixteenth century, a Portuguese traveler in India was surprised to learn from Christians there that they owed their allegiance to a head in Babylon – having never heard of a Pope in Rome.  Indian Nestorians referred to the Patriarch in Babylon as the universal head of the Catholic Church.

There were also examples of agreement – for example, where Chaldeans accepted Roman rule under a new patriarch in exchange for Roman support, all-the-while retaining their separate and unique customs.  Further, many European churches would come under Rome – known as Uniate churches, or Eastern-rite Catholics.

Yet, while pressured by both Muslims and Western Christians, many of these remnant communities survived.  Within the Ottoman Empire, nearly half the population was Christian, although the proportion was significantly lower in the lands east of Constantinople.

Sultans would often use Christians as administrators as, among other reasons, the Christian’s total dependence on the Sultan’s favor would make such administrators more likely to be trustworthy.  Greeks were the sailors; Armenians the merchants and traders.

Obliteration and Destruction

Because the churches of their provinces have been obliterated completely and Christ’s people, that is the Christians, have been utterly destroyed.

-          Anonymous Greek churchman, c. 1480

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died, by Philip Jenkins

Fifty-one metropolitanates, eighteen archbishoprics, and 478 bishoprics – all desolate; barely a few priests, monks and layman remain.  Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem.

As I have noted before, Jenkins moves freely between the church of the farther east (call these Nestorian or Syriac), and the Church of the East (what we today know as Eastern and Oriental Orthodox).  But the message is the same: where there once was a vast stretch of Christianity (albeit the Nestorians not recognized as such by the Orthodox), there remained almost nothing.  This will be examined in Jenkins’ chapter, The Great Tribulation.

It's 1354.  Mobs demand the Christians recite the Muslim profession of faith or face being burned alive.  Monastic estates were confiscated, striking at the financial basis of the Coptic Church.  Churches were razed or converted to Mosques.  Many Christians would accept Islam.

Not just Egypt.  The fourteenth century would mark the decisive collapse of Christianity in the Middle East, Asia, and much of Africa.  This raises an interesting question: Why then?  Why not with the rise of Islam and its rapid military conquests?  Was it the relative strength of the Christian culture at the time, or was it the change in the approach by Muslim leaders against Christians? 

As Jenkins notes, the idea that early Islam was uniformly and consistently tolerant toward Christians really is a false narrative.  It must be kept in mind that early Islam spread by the sword, via conquest.  Yet, changes were not systemic and permanent.  Suffice it to say, Muslims were no more nor no less tolerant of other religions than were Christians (or others).  Persecutions would come and go (and examples are offered by Jenkins), but rarely a total change…until the fourteenth century.

In any case, early on, the Christians in the east favored, in many ways, the Muslim rulers over the Byzantine.  Having been persecuted over the decades due to their “heresies,” this was not an issue under Muslim rule.  In the 650s, the Nestorian patriarch would write:

“The Arabs to whom God has granted at this time the government of the world…do not persecute the Christian religion; on the contrary they favor it, honor our priests and the saints of the Lord and confer benefits on churches and monasteries.”

Others would write similarly.  Whatever the faults of the Muslim rulers, at least they weren’t Byzantine Christians. 

In 869, the Melkite (Orthodox) patriarch of Jerusalem would write of the Muslims, “They are just, and do us no wrong or violence of any kind.”

Often, a regime of personal law was allowed: Christians would by judged based on Christian, not Muslim, law (at least when the conflicts were between Christians).  In remote areas, local Christian leaders would retain significant control.  New bishoprics would be established – even in Arabia! 

But the changes in political rule and authority were, in any case, real: many Christians under Muslim rule would see these changes as God’s punishment for the heresies of the Byzantines.  A later Coptic history would offer:

“And the Lord abandoned the army of the Romans before him, as punishment for their corrupt faith, and because of the anathemas uttered against them, on account of the council of Chalcedon, by the ancient fathers.”

Of course, Byzantine Christian rule last much longer than Christian rule in Egypt, so using the logic offered in this Coptic historical interpretation, one might come to an even less flattering interpretation for these opponents of Chalcedon.

Instead, a more reasonable interpretation, if one wants to see God’s hand in this loss of Byzantium, is offered by Michael the Syrian (a Jacobite):

Neither Rome nor Constantinople

The deep conservatism of these churches, so far removed from papal or imperial control, makes nonsense of claims that church bureaucracy allied with empire to suppress unpleasant truths about Christian origins.

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died, by Philip Jenkins

It is a curious claim, but one heard often.  Why curious?  Well, what has come to us as canon is already problematic enough: not quite aligned accounts in the different Gospels or in the history of the kings of Israel and Judah, to start.  The disciples often shown as clueless, Jesus seemingly praising the servant who cheated his master.  Stuff like that.

But the real troubles come with some of the heterodox accounts of Jesus’s life – heterodox only because of the emperor, according to many.  But Jenkins suggests that such criticisms aren’t valid.

The problem with 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. 

With no pope or emperor to pressure them.  Through the Middle Ages, no Nestorian or Jacobite was under coercion from either pope or emperor.  They were free to include whatever gospels they liked.  Instead of adding, actually they pruned: some from Peter, some from John, Jude, and Revelation.

Even as early as the second century, the Diatessaron assumes four, and only four, authentic Gospels.

 Yes, the same four.  Some background on this work:

The Diatessaron (c. 160–175 AD) is the most prominent early gospel harmony, and was created by Tatian, an Assyrian early Christian apologist and ascetic.

Tatian harmonized the four Gospels, ending with a work that was about 75% as long as the four Gospels in total – having removed duplications, but also not including the two different genealogies of Matthew and Luke, and also not including Jesus’s encounter with the adulteress.  Also, where there were conflicting accounts he chose one or the other in his narrative.  Most scholars agree that he did, from the beginning, include the longer ending of Mark – chapter 16 beginning with verse 9.

The work does not survive, but was reconstructed in 1881 by Theodor Zahn from translations and commentaries. It was used extensively in Eastern churches, until abandoned due to Tatian’s heretical leanings.

Then there is the task of interpretation.  The Syriac churches inherited the approach associated with Antioch: the text must be put in proper historical and cultural context.  The Syriac church was well placed to do just this, given the cultural and language similarities to Jerusalem and Aramaic.

This isn’t to say that it all aligns with what we in the West might understand, nor will I make any theological claim.  My intent is to examine the history, so here goes: the gates of hell, the fires of hell, souls being weighed in the balance.  Per Solomon of Basra, “only stupid men invent” the idea that this means there are actual gates and fires and scales. 

Claiming Tradition

While the potent Christian presence in Asia is remarkable enough in its own right, these churches also had a claim to a direct tradition from the apostolic age at least as strong as those boasted by Rome and Constantinople.

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died, by Philip Jenkins

…Eusebius claims that missionaries speaking Aramaic or Hebrew had already reached [India] before the second century and had left an original manuscript of the Gospel of Matthew.

I start with this opening, as it speaks directly to one of my…let’s call it…pet peeves.  The more I have gone into Church history, the more I have concluded that anyone claiming to be following the (as in “the only”) apostolic tradition, and to be following it consistently for 2000 years, is talking nonsense.

Every tradition, a thousand miles west, east, and south of Jerusalem, lays claim to an apostle and lays claim to following the teaching of the apostle.  Yet, there are differences – meaningful enough that the Church divided – as early as 431 at Ephesus, at 451 at Chalcedon, and, as almost an afterthought, 1054 in Constantinople. 

So, stop with this nonsense. 

And now that is off my chest…at least for today.

Some statements apply across the various theological traditions, from the Orthodox to the Nestorians and Jacobites, and the Copts.

Strongly liturgical churches that displayed foretastes of heaven; hierarchical in organization; appeals to all the senses – sound, sight, smell, taste, touch.  And genuine antiquity:

…the Syriac Anaphora of the Apostles Addai and Mari is the oldest Christian liturgy still in use.

OK, who…and what? Per Wikipedia, Addai was a disciple of Thomas, and Mari was a disciple of Addai. From the Catholic Encyclopedia:

This is an Oriental liturgy, sometimes assigned to the Syrian group because it is written in the Syriac tongue; sometimes to the Persian group because it was used in Mesopotamia and Persia. It is known as the normal liturgy of the Nestorians, but probably it had been in use before the rise of the Nestorian heresy.

It is still used today, and not just by “heretics”:

At the present time this liturgy is used chiefly by the Nestorians, who reside for the most part in Kurdistan. It is also used by the Chaldean Uniats of the same region, but their liturgy has, of course, been purged of all traces of Nestorian tenets. Finally, it is in use among the Chaldean Uniats of Malabar, but it was very much altered by the Synod of Diamper held in 1599.

Returning to Jenkins, he notes that all of these eastern churches saw monasticism as the highest form of Christian life, just as did the churches to the west of them. 

…the ascetic fathers went forth into the wilderness…to battle against principalities and powers and with the evil spirits which are under heaven.

We could use a few of these right now. 

Go East Young Man

No one has been sent to us Orientals by the Pope.  The holy apostles aforesaid taught us and we still hold today what they handed  down to us.

-          Rabban Bar Sauma, c. 1290 (from the Nestorian Church of the East in China)

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died, by Philip Jenkins

Merv, today a dead city but at one time a major city in what is now Turkmenistan and a center of trade along the Silk Road, was, in the twelfth century, one of the largest cities in the world.  By the 420s, it had a bishop, and in the first half of the sixth century it became a metropolitan see of the Eastern (Nestorian) Church.

Around the year 500, it was already translating major works from Greek and Syriac sources into the languages of central and eastern Asia.  This rich intellectual life continued until the thirteenth century – and could compete with intellectual life anywhere in the Christian world until the establishment of universities in western Europe in the twelfth century.

This under Muslim rule, with Christians a minority, yet it survived and even thrived – a Christian world completely outside of any European context.  At a time when Rome was an outlier (even taking many of its earliest popes from Syria) – the only one of the five great patriarchates in Europe, with the others all in Asia – Merv was already established as an important center.

I found the following fascinating, and by citing the author I do not intend to mean that I agree or have otherwise researched the claim.  But, here goes:

Repeatedly, we find that what we think of as the customs or practices of the Western churches were rooted in Syria or Mesopotamia.  Eastern churches, for instance, had a special devotion to the Virgin Mary, derived partly from popular apocryphal Gospels.

This devotion gave rise to new feasts: the Purification, the Annunciation, as well as commemorations of her birth and passing.  By the end of the seventh century, these were all popularized by Pope Sergius – whose family was from Antioch.

Now…this brings me to a side note, one that I must make for clarification because the lines are blurred – perhaps out of historical reality – by Jenkins.  It has always been easy for me to understand Rome / Latin as compared to Constantinople / Eastern Orthodox / Greek.  I have also distinguished what we today call Oriental Orthodox, such as the Armenian, Coptic, and Ethiopian Churches – those that split off after Chalcedon.

Through this book, the examination is of another – call it a third – Eastern Church, sometimes referred to by Jenkins as Nestorian, Syriac…or even “Eastern.”  Jenkins sometimes blends these various Eastern churches, but perhaps there is little choice.  Where does one draw the lines when belief is not limited to or clearly defined by a political or geographic border?

Sure, the Christianity in China was different than the Christianity in Constantinople.  But what of the areas in between, where both could be found, or where beliefs were not so clearly distinguishable?

Where I am comfortable, I will attempt to clarify the lines.  However, I am coming to accept that there will be fluidity – and perhaps necessarily so.  For example, as much as any other reason, Christianity spread far to the east due to the fluidity of trade – the Silk Roads, running from the Mediterranean to the heart of China. 

In any case, Jerusalem is closer to central Asia than it is to France:

If early Christians could reach Ireland, there was no logical reason why they should not find their way to Sri Lanka.

Christianity spread along protected trade routes (far more developed in Asia than in the Europe outside of the Mediterranean world), with Christian traders using language familiar to the elites.  The borders, fluid and changing, mattered little to trade – hence to the progress of Christianity.

In Africa, Nubia survived as a Christian kingdom from the sixth century to the fifteenth.  Its churches and cathedrals were decorated in the best Byzantine style.  Its main cathedral, at Faras, was adorned with hundreds of paintings – kings, bishops, and saints.  It lay forgotten under the sand until the 1960s.

Meanwhile, the church in Abyssinia (Ethiopia) continues until today.  Aksum is the reputed home of the Ark of the Covenant; the medieval ruling dynasty claimed descent from Solomon and the queen of Sheba.  Ethiopia – the true Israel?

Loss…and a Remnant

Religions die. …For a thousand years, India was mainly Buddhist, a faith that now enjoys only marginal status in that land.  Once Persia was Zoroastrian; Spain, Muslim.

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died, by Philip Jenkins

This story is about none of these.  It is the story of a Christianity that has almost completely disappeared, a Christianity in the east – east of Byzantium, outside of Eastern Orthodoxy.  Many of us are reasonably familiar with the Christianity that was lost to Islam in North Africa and the Middle East – and, for a time, Spain.

These weren’t wholly voluntary conversions – these were the result of wars and slavery.  Yes, some also converted to save their lives.  This wasn’t the case for Europe, the history we know best – at least the history I know best (relatively).

Europe was the continent where [Christianity] was not destroyed.

Which leads, once again, to the real dilemma: Christians and violence.  Love you enemy…but what if this comes in conflict with loving your neighbor?

Christianity wasn’t destroyed in Europe because the Christians in Europe fought to save it – and, at times, in very non-Christian ways (and pacifist Christians would say, at all times in non-Christian ways).  See, for example, Charles Martel in 732, Otto I in 955, and John III Sobieski in 1683.  What would Christianity look like today without such men?  (Hint: we are seeing what it will look like because today we do not have such men.)

Much of what is today the Islamic world was once Christian.  Christianity spread as far east as Western China, and also throughout North Africa.  As late as the eleventh century, about one-third of the world’s Christians lived in Asia; about ten percent in Africa (a figure only again achieved in the 1960s). 

There was the Christian world centered on Rome; another centered on Constantinople.  But there was a third, stretching deep into Asia.  And it is this third center that is the subject of Jenkins’ book.

About 780, the bishop Timothy became patriarch, or catholicos, of the Church of the East, which was then based at the ancient Mesopotamian city of Seleucia.

This Church, as a distinct Church, has its roots in a split after the Council of Ephesus in 431.  It had to do with the condemning of Nestorius and the Christological controversies of the time (of which I have written here). 

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.

And he could claim apostolic succession with the best of them – tradition has it from the apostle Thomas.  Yes, Catholic and Eastern Orthodox consider these churches heretical, but locally they were considered Christian – and as apostolic as the rest.  In terms of scholarship, they achieved by around 800 what Latin Europe would not achieve until five centuries later.

The East still thought and spoke in Syriac, an Aramaic dialect.  For centuries they referred to themselves as Nasraye – Nazarenes – a form preserving the Aramaic term used by the apostles.  Jesus was Yeshua. 

And then there is this claim by Jenkins:

If we are ever tempted to speculate on what the early church might have looked like if it had developed independently, avoiding the mixed blessing of its alliance with Roman state power, we have but to look east.

Keeping in mind that Roman state power included both Rome and Constantinople – the New Rome.

Those Other Christians

Throughout this book, I refer to the Eastern Christian churches that are commonly known as Jacobite and Nestorian.  Both names raise problems…. …a reader would not go far wrong by understanding both terms as meaning simply “ancient Christian denominations mainly active outside Europe.”

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died, by Philip Jenkins

There was once a substantial Christian Church, in lands east of the Greek Church, stretching to today’s Afghanistan and beyond.  I have covered this history once before, briefly, via on chapter in The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, by Peter Frankopan.  But that was merely one chapter in Frankopan’s book.  Jenkins devotes an entire book to the topic, and I will work through it.

In that earlier post, I wrote:

The story of the spread of Christianity from Palestine to the west is well known; the spread of Christianity to the east was far more remarkable and extensive.  Christianity was brought in through the trade routes, as well as through the deportations of Christians from Syria.

Evangelists reached north into Georgia, reaching a large community of Jews who converted.  There were dozens of Christian communities along the Persian Gulf and as far to the east as today’s Afghanistan.

Jenkins introduces the churches of this region – Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia – as churches where the early Christians wrote and thought in Syriac, a language closely related to Jesus’s Aramaic.   Passionate debates with the Greek and Roman Churches ensued, resulting in divisions even as early as the Council of Nicea in 325.

Yes, Christ was in some sense both human and divine, but what was the exact relationship between the two elements?  How could someone say that Jesus was both man and God?

A disagreement that would continue until Chalcedon in 451 and even beyond, as examined by V.C. Samuel.  Not to revisit this theological controversy (please keep in mind, I write of these matters to understand the history, not to debate theology), but Patriarch Nestorius – who accepted the two natures – did not accept the mystical sense in which these were united.  Hence, no Theotokos.

Jenkins makes what is an unfortunate error when writing that many in Egypt and the East accepted only one nature – hence “Monophysites.”  As Samuel demonstrated in the aforementioned work, those in these regions did not write in such a “Monophysite” manner.  The two natures were there, the only issue being, precisely how?

The Jacobites held sway in Greater Syria; the Nestorians in what we now know as Iraq and Iran.  However, Jenkins does not intend that by using these labels these groups were anything less than Christian.  I keep in mind, the differences were still being worked out, and, truth be told, it isn’t like there was a solid Scriptural basis for one teaching or another (as long as human and divine were both in there…somehow, as if we are really capable of understanding this or putting this into words).

Many today from the Roman Church or the Greek Church would claim “tradition” as the way by which to settle these differences – differences not made clear in Scripture.  But, as I have often argued, which tradition?  These churches in the furthest reaches of the east had just as much claim to the tradition of the first three or four centuries as the other churches.