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the Syriac Anaphora of the Apostles Addai and Mari is the oldest Christian liturgy still in use.1
References to the monastic “fathers” obscures the undoubted role of women religious, and from the earliest ages, both Egypt and Mesopotamia had their spiritual mothers, ammas, as well as fathers, abbas.
Mainstream Eastern churches taught daring ideas about the potential of approaching God so closely as actually to become divine. Athanasius, the great Alexandrian patriarch so often presented as the enforcer of narrow orthodoxy in the age of Constantine, preached that “God became man so that men might become gods.” He had many successors, especially in Egypt and Syria, where theosis, or deification, became a common goal of the spiritual life.
Personal sacrifice and asceticism led to sanctity, which was manifested in healings and miracles. Cosmas, a seventh-century bishop of Amida, “performed marvelous miracles like Elijah the Tishbite and the first apostles.” All forms of Christianity, East or West, emphasized charismatic and miraculous themes, to a degree that separated them from more rationalistic Muslim contemporaries.
The best argument for Christianity was that its holy men and women were so close to God that they could defy the laws of nature and demonstrate divine power through acts of miracle and healing.
if material success proved the truth of a religion, how would Christians cope when their kings suffered defeat after defeat, when their cities and churches were destroyed and plundered? As we will see, although Christians did their best to explain away these secular disasters, the constant sequence of catastrophes in the later Middle Ages proved devastating to hopes of Christian survival.
passionately committed to learning and scholarship, building chiefly upon local traditions and languages. For centuries after the conversion of the Roman Empire, Christianity was polyglot.
In 1026, Nisibis was the scene of a famous debate between the Nestorian bishop Elijah and a Muslim vizier. Arguing for the superiority of Syriac over Arabic, the bishop made the seemingly incontestable claim that Arabs had learned most of their science from Syriac sources, while the reverse had seldom occurred.12
In the mid–seventh century, he wrote extensively on cosmography, on the causes of eclipses, and on geometry and arithmetic: he offers a classic account of the astrolabe. He also wrote commentaries on Aristotle’s logic, translating the Analytics. Like Bishop Elijah, he was very proud of the Syriac achievement, claiming that the Greeks had taken all they knew from the Chaldeans, whom everyone knew to be really Syrians.
For a thousand years, Syriac Christians produced scholars and thinkers who could be set beside the best of their Greek or Latin contemporaries, and who shaped the emerging world of Islamic science and philosophy.
Throughout the Middle Ages, Syriac Christian scholars continued to use thoroughly Semitic literary styles and approaches to scripture, which often gives their work a startlingly primitive feel. These churches had a boundless veneration for the Bible, which they read in their own Semitic language. In Nestorian epitaphs from China and central Asia, the highest praise is reserved for those who interpreted the scriptures. From the year 1316, “year of the dragon,” we find a commemoration of “Shliha the celebrated commentator and teacher, who illuminated all the monasteries with light, son of Peter
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Around the year 170, Tatian created a Syriac version of the four canonical Gospels combined into a single harmony, the Diatessaron, the “Through Four.”
Peshitta Syriac text of the whole Bible, so called because it was the “simple version.” In the Old Testament, this represents a direct translation from ancient Hebrew texts, probably done in Edessa or Arbela. The Peshitta remained the standard version for the Eastern churches, just as the Latin Vulgate did for the Western church.29
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 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 deep conservatism of these churches, so far removed from papal or imperial control, makes nonsense of claims that the church bureaucracy allied with empire to suppress unpleasant truths about Christian origins.31
Syriac scholars like Isho'dad and Bar Salibi operate in a thought world identical to that of the Talmudists, and they are just as likely to produce explanations that are ingenious, if not actually correct.
as some critics charge that the Eastern Christians watered down their faith in order to appeal to Chinese or Indian societies. Naturally, Christians presented their faith in the form of sutras, on the lines already made familiar by Buddhist missionaries and teachers, and a stunning collection of Jesus Sutras has come to light in modern times in caves at Dunhuang.
As patriarch from 1281 to 1317, under the name Yaballaha III, he “exercised ecclesiastical sovereignty over more of the earth’s surface than even the pontiff in Rome.”
1354 reached an alarming new intensity. Mobs demanded that Christians and Jews recite the Muslim profession of faith upon threat of being burned alive. The government struck at churches and confiscated the estates of monasteries, destroying the financial basis of the Coptic Church.
610 First revelation to the Prophet Muhammad
see, Muslims were slow to identify themselves as a distinct religion wholly separate from Jews and Christians. Matters were seen rather in ethnic terms, and early chronicles speak not of Muslims and Christians but of Arabs and Syrians.8
Christians were treated rather better than other groups, who did not qualify as approved and tolerated People of the Book.
The few modern followers of the old Persian religion are found among India’s Parsis, descendants of those who emigrated in the ninth or tenth century.
Nestorian patriarch Isho’yahb wrote: “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.”
Even Orthodox clergy had mixed feelings about the rise of Muslim power. Church Father Saint John Damascene could write freely against the theological errors of the Byzantine emperors because he was safely ensconced at the court of the caliph, who did not interfere in such intra-Christian bickering.
The Byzantines called him Sarakenophron, “Saracen-minded.” In 869, the Melkite (Orthodox) patriarch of Jerusalem wrote of the Muslims, “They are just, and do us no wrong or violence of any kind.”13
Christian complaints about tyranny and extortionate taxation often prove to be describing injustices imposed on all religions alike, as part of the standard procedure of early medieval governments. After cataloging the horrors of Abbasid taxation, an eighth-century Christian chronicler says that if Christians alone were affected, he would have been quick to write of martyrdom. In the event, the disasters affected “Arabs and Syrians…poor and wealthy, all mixed together.”
the rising center of Cairo. Church-state connections remained startlingly favorable. One thirteenth-century Coptic patriarch prayed, “May God—praised be He—make victorious their sultan, and he is our sultan, and their imam, and he is our shepherd.”21
In 1933, Muslim forces in the new nation of Iraq launched a deadly assault on the few surviving communities of the Nestorian or Assyrian peoples, in what had once been the Christian heartland of northern Mesopotamia.
So shocking were the anti-Christian purges that they demanded a new legal vocabulary. Some months afterward, Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin used the cases of the Assyrians, and the Christian Armenians before them, to argue for a new legal category to be called crimes of barbarity, primarily “acts of extermination directed against the ethnic, religious or social collectivities whatever the motive (political, religious, etc.).” Lemkin developed this theme over the following years, and in 1943 he coined a new word for this atrocious behavior—namely, genocide.
regimes: as Hitler asked in 1939, “Who, after all, speaks to-day of the annihilation of the Armenians?”3
We can argue about the causes of that change, whether they can legitimately be described as religious rather than political, but the result was to create a Muslim world that was just as Christian-free as large sections of Europe would be Jew-free after the Second World War.
The most important force in that story of conquest was the Ottoman Empire, which began as a small power in Asia Minor. After the Mongol invasions destroyed the great Seljuk state, the Ottoman Turks used the ensuing wars to create a power base in Asia Minor, and they gradually spread over what had been the Byzantine Christian world.
Ottomans were often more aggressively anti-Christian than were the original Arab conquerors of the Middle East.
Ottoman forces carried out notorious massacres against Christian populations, and particularly targeted Christian clergy and leaders. In 1480, the Turks destroyed the Italian city of Otranto, killing twelve thousand and executing leading clergymen by sawing them. The
The Christian leader who most effectively deployed such tactics against the Turks themselves was Vlad of Wallachia, “the Impaler,” who is remembered in Western folklore through tales of Dracula.6
Turks termed Balkan Christians rayah, “the herd,” as animals to be sheared and exploited as necessary.
Most of the Orthodox churches now followed their old Nestorian and Jacobite rivals in passing under Muslim rule. But Muslims were not the only threat to their survival. In addition to the constant pressures from expanding Islam, all the surviving Eastern churches also faced real dangers from a newly assertive Western Christianity, which tried to bring these struggling bodies under its own power.
In 1723, a French Jesuit reported “that the Copts in Egypt are a strange people far removed from the kingdom of God…although they say they are Christians they are such only in name and appearance. Indeed many of them are so odd that outside of their physical form scarcely anything human can be detected in them.” Although Christ had ordained that salvation must be extended to all, Copts seemed a particularly hard case: “in any event we should not omit to teach the ignorant Copts in the faith as incapable as they
Bafflingly, they had not so much as heard of a pope at Rome.
The most controversial moment in this process occurred in 1599, when Catholic authorities in southern India sought to absorb the ancient Syriac-founded churches of the region, the Thomas Christians.
Eastern Christian communities survived. At its height, the Ottoman Empire encompassed the Middle East, the Balkans, and North Africa, and especially in Europe included millions of subject Christians. Even in 1900, Muslims made up just half the empire’s overall population: Christians comprised 46 percent; Jews, 3 percent. Christian numbers were obviously smaller in the Asian territories, the lands east of Constantinople, but they were still thriving.16
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
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From the First World War onward, Christian communities were systematically eliminated across the Muslim world, and the Armenian horrors of 1915 are only the most glaring of a series of such atrocities that reached their peak between 1915 and 1925.
The patriarch of Constantinople was hanged outside his cathedral—on Easter morning!—and
The Syriac Christians of northern Mesopotamia also suffered during the red year of 1895, especially in the ancient sanctuaries in and around Amida and Tur Abdin.
Christians were prominent in Palestinian nationalist causes—inevitably, since they represented much of the educated professional elite that stood to lose most from the growth of Zionist settlement. At least as much as for Muslims, the creation of the state of Israel was for Christians the Nakba, the catastrophe: the war of 1948 caused the exodus of 650,000 Muslim Palestinians, and a further 55,000 Christians.
Otherwise, Arab Christians complain that their existence has been largely forgotten in the West, especially by those evangelicals who pledge uncritical support for “Christian Zionism.”44
Much of the sensational Palestinian terrorism across the globe in the 1970s was planned and orchestrated by Christian commanders like George Habash, Wadih Haddad, and Nayef Hawatmeh, who often operated in alliance with the Baathist regimes. Although he did not invent the tactic, Wadih Haddad was the first Arab guerrilla leader to use airliner hijacking on a major scale.
The most dramatic catastrophe in recent years has been that of Iraq’s Christians, who represented 5 or 6 percent of the population in 1970. That number is now around 1 percent, and it is shrinking fast.
