A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years

by Diarmaid MacCulloch

One of the Syrians’ earliest extensions of the Christian faith was to India.

the Apostle Thomas,

Consistently, the Church of the East remained united by adhering to its Syrian roots, displaying the vigorous individuality which Syriac Christianity had exhibited from its earliest years.

it treasured the memory of the prophet Jonah (one of the Bible’s most entertaining explicit fictions).

the Church of the East remembered that the point of his sojourn in the fish was that Jonah had been unsuccessfully trying to avoid God’s call to preach salvation to the Assyrians’ hated city Nineveh – and now there was a Christian bishop of the Church of the East in Nineveh, to complete Jonah’s work!

human beings could do their best to imitate the holiness of Christ.

it also represents an optimistic pole of the Christian spectrum of beliefs in human worth, potential and capacity, because if Jesus had a whole human nature, it must by definition be good, and logically all human nature began by being good, whatever its subsequent corruptions.

Evagrius Ponticus

Isaac, a seventh-century monk from Qatar who briefly held the resonant title Bishop of Nineveh, took up the notion which Evagrius had derived from the writings of that audacious Alexandrian Origen that in the end all will be saved.

the Dyophysite Church

hung on to Syriac as a common liturgical and theological language in the most exotic of settings, as far east as China,

neither this Nestorian script nor its western Syrian counterpart (Serto) developed a cursive or minuscule form for rapid writing, so it was possible for readers over several centuries to follow and understand very ancient texts written in it.

the Church of the East never permanently captured the allegiance of any royal family,

Sassanian Shah Khusrau II

Kavad II.

for the first time in the Sassanian Empire’s history it is likely that a majority of the Shah’s subjects were Christian.

Catholicos

Ishoyahb II,

He sent a delegation to the Chinese Tang emperor led by a bishop whom the Chinese called Alopen.

Alopen

Here is a tangible link to the Chinese community of the Church of the East, which although long lost now was destined to persist over seven centuries.

Patriarch Ishoyahb,

their subsequent extraordinary expansion was inseparable from military conquest.

Dyophysite Patriarch Henanisho I

forced conversions were not at all the rule in early Islam, even while it was extending its reach by military campaigns.

Conversion to Islam can therefore be a deeply felt aesthetic experience that rarely occurs in Christian accounts of conversion, which are generally the source rather than the result of a Christian experience of beauty.

The Qur’an is strikingly preoccupied with the two monotheisms which Muhammad had known from his boyhood, Judaism and Christianity.

‘the God’ (al-ilah, subsequently abbreviated as Allah)

a long sura which takes its name of ‘The Cow’ from its references to stories of Moses and the Children of Israel in their Exodus from Egypt.

Sura 2, contains 286 verses (paragraphs).

there is one silence in the Qur’an which is startling once it is noticed: the name of Paul of Tarsus.

‘Ebionite’

‘The [Muslim] believers, the Jews, the Christians, and the Sabians [an Arabian monotheism] – all those who believe in God and the Last Day and do good – will have their rewards with the Lord’.

Those who believe (in the Qur'an), and those who follow the Jewish (scriptures), and the Christians and the Sabians,- any who believe in Allah and the Last Day, and work righteousness, shall have their reward with their Lord; on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve. 2.62

decisively moved the centre of Christian gravity westwards.

Christianity’s internal divisions made the task easier:

there were plenty of Miaphysite or Dyophysite Christians who had no especial affection for the Chalcedonian rulers in Constantinople,

and equally, plenty of Christians who had little time for Zoroastrian Sassanians, and who did not defend...

The Muslim conquerors did little to explain their faith to their new subjects or to convert them to it.

The result was one of the most rapid shifts of power in history.

‘Dome of the Rock’

From their conquest of Alexandria and all Egypt by 641, they took a half-century of hard fighting to reach the Straits of Gibraltar,

said to have been one of Muhammad’s deathbed commands and set about eliminating Christianity from the peninsula.

It may be the result of a policy of thorough Islamic destruction that no trace remains of a Bible in Arabic which can be dated to the era of flourishing Christianity before the coming of Islam;

on the other hand, given the Syriac character of the Arabian Churches before, maybe it had never existed.13

Caliph Umar I

Umar

the Umayyad dynasty,

under the last great Abbasid Caliph Al-Mutawakkil (reigned 847–61) they were forced to wear distinctive clothing in yellow

Muslims were torn between the general cultural respect for ascetic holy men in the Middle East, attested in the Qur’an itself, and other pronouncements of the Qur’an which condemn monks as dangerous charlatans.

One famous monastery below Mount Sinai refounded by Justinian and later dedicated to St Catherine of Alexandria

One of the most influential theologians for Byzantine Orthodoxy in the years around 700 (see pp. 447–8) spent all his life as a subject of the Umayyad caliph in Damascus, and he was indeed ethnically an Arab, as his family name, Mansūr, revealed; he has come to be known as John of Damascus.