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

If we combine all the different branches of these churches, we find barely half a million faithful in all by the early twentieth century, scattered from Cyprus and Syria to Persia. (India had a further six hundred thousand “Syrians.”) The implosion in numbers led to a steep decline in morale and ambition. Instead of trying to convert the whole of Asia, the Syrian churches survived as inward-looking quasi-tribal bodies within the Near East. Succession to the Nestorian patriarchate became hereditary, passing from uncle to nephew. Intellectual activity declined to nothing, at least in comparison with the glorious past. Many clergy were illiterate, and the church texts that do survive are often deeply imbued with superstition and folk magic. In the early twentieth century, the Catholic Encyclopedia pronounced, harshly, “From the fourteenth century, Syriac literature produced no works of value.”