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In Egypt, by contrast, which has been under Muslim rule since 640, not only does native Christianity survive to this day, but the Coptic Church has often exercised social and political influence. Even in the twentieth century, it probably still retained the loyalty of 10 percent of Egyptians. Possibly, such radical differences reflect different official policies, differing degrees of persecution, though nothing suggests that the conquerors of North Africa were dedicated to a kind of religious genocide.
The key difference making for survival is rather how deep a church planted its roots in a particular community, and how far the religion became part of the air that ordinary people breathed.
While the Egyptians put the Christian faith in the language of the ordinary people, from city dwellers through peasants, the Africans concentrated only on certain categories, certain races. Egyptian Christianity became native; its African counterpart was colonial.
Even after the overwhelming persecution that uprooted the Japanese church, thousands of “hidden Christians,” kakure kirishitan, somehow maintained their clandestine traditions in remote fishing villages and island communities. This catacomb church strayed far from mainstream Catholicism, and many of its practices make it look almost like a Shinto sect: their Eucharistic elements are rice, fish, and sake.
And crypto-Christians are startlingly abundant. The World Christian Encyclopedia suggests that in the year 2000, 120 million believers fell into this crypto-Christian category, some 6 percent of the world’s Christians, mainly concentrated in Asian nations like India and China.
This is also, largely, a distinctively Christian phenomenon: while other religions, including Judaism and Islam, possess their secret believers, the absolute numbers are tiny beside those of crypto-Christians.
Mosques look as they do because their appearance derives from that of Eastern Christian churches in the early days of Islam. Likewise, most of the religious practices of the believers within those mosques stem from the example of Eastern Christians, including the prostrations that appear so alien to modern Westerners. The severe self-denial of Ramadan was originally based on the Eastern practice of Lent. The Quran itself often shows startling parallels with Eastern Christian scriptures, devotional texts, and hymns, and some scholars have even argued that much of the text originated in Syriac
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Only by understanding the lost Eastern Christianities can we understand where Islam comes from, and how very close it is to Christianity.
It was the Christian monastics who had sought ecstasy and unity with the divine by the ceaseless repetition of prayers, a practice that would become central to the Sufi tradition.
Often, when faithful Christians complain about aspects of that alien religion, they are in fact denouncing customs or beliefs that are deeply rooted within the most ancient forms of their own Christian faith.
above all in Africa, which is currently home to 20 percent of the world’s Christians, and that proportion should grow steeply in coming decades.
Watching Christians of various shades murdering and persecuting each other daily, Saint Vincent recalled that Jesus promised that his church would last until the end of time, but that he never mentioned the words in Europe.
The conventionally negative account of Christian history includes much that is true, in some places and at some times: we need not look far to find religious hatred and anti-Semitism, militarism and corruption. But the story is much more diverse than is commonly believed, much less a catalog of rigid orthodoxies enforced from above by the repressive mechanisms of church and (Christian) state.
For several centuries, it was also one of the world’s greatest Christian centers. Merv had a bishop by the 420s, and in 544 it became a metropolitan see of the Eastern (Nestorian) church.
The city had a rich history of Christian intellectual and spiritual life from the sixth century through the thirteenth, and Merv could compete in vigor with any European center, certainly before the universities emerged in western Europe during the twelfth century. Merv’s scholars had access to Syriac versions of Aristotle at a time when these texts were quite forgotten in western Europe.
From the seventh century, Merv was under Muslim rule, but Christians coexisted with Buddhists, Zoroastrians, and Manichaeans. The city was notorious for producing idiosyncratic blends of different faiths, old and new. Eighth-century Merv was the home of al-Muqanna, the Veiled Prophet, who claimed to be God incarnate.2
By the fifth century, Christianity had five great patriarchates, and only one, Rome, was to be found in Europe. Of the others, Alexandria stood on the African continent, and three (Constantinople, Antioch, and Jerusalem) were in Asia. After the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, Christianity maintained its cultural and intellectual traditions in the Eastern empire, in Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt.3
Between 640 and 740, no fewer than six popes derived from Syria, in addition to several Greek natives. When the Roman church in the 660s decided to bolster the emerging church in England, it sent as the new archbishop of Canterbury Theodore of Tarsus, from Cilicia, supported by the African abbot Hadrian. The last of the “Greek” Fathers acknowledged by the church was the Syrian John of Damascus, who was Greek only in language. John (originally named Mansur) lived and worked in eighth-century Syria, and he held high office in the court of the Muslim caliph.
Eastern churches, for instance, had a special devotion to the Virgin Mary, derived partly from popular apocryphal Gospels. This enthusiasm gave rise to a number of new feasts such as the Purification and the Annunciation, as well as the commemorations of Mary’s birth and passing, or Dormition. At the end of the seventh century, all these feasts were popularized in Rome by Pope Sergius, whose family was from Antioch. From there, the new Marian devotion spread across western Europe.5
Syria (Edessa?) produced the Odes of Solomon—what has been termed “the earliest Christian hymnbook.” The earliest known pioneer of Christian music and chant was the Gnostic Bardaisan of Edessa, who around 200 composed hymns and songs that won a wide audience.
When modern Catholics and Episcopalians sing the Agnus Dei in their liturgy, when they invoke the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,” they are following the Syrian custom imported to the Western church by Pope Sergius.
But in fact, this was also the story of the Persian Empire, where Christians won some of their most enduring successes.
The great Antioch on the Orontes, the city where the name “Christian” first arose, was a terminus for an ancient trade route connecting the Mediterranean world to Persia and central Asia.
From Jerusalem to Athens is eight hundred miles as the crow flies: it is fourteen hundred miles to Rome, fifteen hundred to Carthage, and over two thousand to Paris or London. But just imagine traveling similar distances in the opposite direction, by land rather than sea. Going east from Jerusalem, the distance to Baghdad is just six hundred miles. From Jerusalem to Tehran is less than a thousand miles, while it is fourteen hundred to Merv and eighteen hundred fifty to Samarkand. Just in terms of mileage, Jerusalem is equidistant from Merv and Rome. Jerusalem is actually closer to the
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The world’s first Christian kingdom was Osrhoene, beyond the eastern borders of the Roman Empire, with its capital at Edessa: its king accepted Christianity around 200.15
Georgia, too, acquired its alphabet from Christian missionaries.
The strength of Christianity in Egypt made it very likely that the faith would expand up the Nile, deep into Africa, and Syrian missionaries led the way. Nubia survived as a Christian kingdom from the sixth century through the fifteenth, dominating the Nile between Khartoum and Aswan, and straddling the modern-day border of Egypt and Sudan.
Ethiopia, or Abyssinia, was still more powerful than Nubia, and its Christianity longer lasting. It was in fact converted even before Constantine accepted the faith.
Even an author from Counter-Reformation Portugal, where religious houses were far from scarce, asserted that [n]o country in the world is so full of churches, monasteries and ecclesiastics as Abyssinia; it is not possible to sing in one church without being heard by another, and perhaps by several…. this people has a natural disposition to goodness; they are very liberal of their alms, they much frequent their churches, and are very studious to adorn them; they practice fasting and other mortifications…[they] retain in a great measure the devout fervor of the primitive Christians.20
rule: as late as the fourteenth century, Ethiopia tried to prevent the ongoing persecution in Egypt by threatening to dam the Nile.22
in the fourth century, the Persians killed sixteen thousand Christian believers in a forty-year period.23
The number and importance of such religious dissidents grew steadily with the fifth-century splits over the relationship between Christ’s human and divine natures. Monophysite teachings dominated in Syria and Egypt, and also prevailed in the Christian states of Armenia and Ethiopia. Orthodox supporters of the Council of Chalcedon were so massively outnumbered that they were dismissively known as Melkites—“the emperor’s men”—suggesting that only their desire to please government could account for their wrongheaded opinions.25
Within the Persian Empire, the main Christian church was based in the twin cities of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the imperial capital that was the successor to ancient Babylon, and the most populous city in the world at that time. This church followed the teachings of Nestorius after 431, detaching itself from the authority of Antioch: in 498 its head, the catholicos, took the title of patriarch of Babylon, the patriarch of the East. In the sixth century, Asian Monophysites also developed their own church apparatus, through the organizing ability of Jacobus Baradaeus. From his base in Edessa, Jacobus
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When the Romans closed the Nestorian university at Edessa, its leaders took up residence farther east at Nisibis, under Persian protection. As a chronicler boasted, “Edessa darkened and Nisibis brightened.”33 Even so, Edessa remained “the Blessed” for all denominations well into the Muslim period.
At different times, Jacobite leaders were based in Amida and in Tikrit, a city that in modern times gained notoriety as the home of Saddam Hussein and his Sunni Muslim al-Tikriti clan, which dominated Iraq under the Baathist regime.
The house of Mor Gabriel, founded in the late fourth century, is today the oldest functioning monastery of the Jacobite Church (known in modern times as “Syrian Orthodox”).
644, a chronicle tells how “Elias Metropolitan of Merv, converted a large number of Turks.”
saint took them to a stream, baptized all of them, ordained for them priests and deacons, and returned
By 650, the Church of the East had two metropolitans beyond the Oxus, probably based at Kashgar and Samarkand, besides twenty bishops. At the end of the eighth century, the patriarch Timothy renewed the church’s eastward drive, to the lands of the Turks and Tibetans, in a golden age of missionary expansion.40
Syriac Christian writers used the word merchant as a metaphor for those who spread the gospel.
Such merchants also brought the Syriac language. Even the Mongol word for “religious law” or “Buddhism”—nom—probably comes from the Greek nomos, via Syriac.
The Chinese missions naturally attracted special attention. China, after all, was already more populous than the whole of Europe. We are not sure when Nestorians reached China—just when did the first Christian see the Pacific?—but already in 550, some monks smuggled silkworms from Serinda (China) to the Byzantine Empire.
By the end of the eighth century, the Chinese church was led by Bishop Adam, whom we have already met as an ally of Buddhism, but who also promoted his own cause.
Between the tenth century and the thirteenth, Christianity has no recorded history in China, which does not mean that it did not maintain a subterranean existence. But Nestorians returned in force when the Mongols conquered the nation and established the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). Mongol rulers like Kublai Khan were happy to tolerate the Christian and Buddhist religions, and Marco Polo often reports finding Christian communities.
India, where Christian communities claimed a succession dating back to Saint Thomas the apostle. Christianity appeared in southern India no later than the second century, and other missions and monasteries followed. Around 425, we hear of an Indian priest translating the Epistle to the Romans from Greek into Syriac.
Manichaeans still believed that Jesus, like Buddha, was one of the great prophets who came to enlighten believers.
In the twelfth century, tales of Christian tribes in central Asia—and of Christian kings in Ethiopia—inspired the enduring European legend of Prester John. John, the immensely powerful Christian priest-king who lived far beyond the boundaries of the known world, was reputedly descended from one of the three Magi. According to a bogus letter that surfaced in Europe in the 1140s, Prester John declared that he was “a zealous Christian and universally protected the Christians of our empire, supporting them by our alms…. Seventy-two provinces, of which only a few are Christian, serve us. Each has
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The Franks who conquered Roman Gaul accepted the faith in the early sixth century, the Anglo-Saxons during the seventh, but that still left a great deal of Europe unevangelized.
The continuing strength of Christianity in Asia is obvious if we look at the distribution of the world’s believers around the year 1000, roughly at the halfway point in the story of the faith. Still, at that point, Asia had 17 to 20 million Christians, with a further 5 million in Africa. The European continent as a whole had some 40 million people, including Russia. Of those Europeans, at least a quarter either were still pagan or else lived in countries that had only very recently undergone formal conversion. That overall total would also include the Muslim inhabitants of Spain and Sicily,
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Some statements apply across the various theological traditions, from the Orthodox to the Nestorians and Jacobites, and the Copts. All these churches were strongly liturgical and hierarchical, with glorious liturgies that presented not just displays of the church’s wealth but, literally, foretastes of heaven.
