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

And what of the Nestorians, the great Church of the East? In southern India, several million Christians today represent the remnants of those missions, although most are affiliated with Catholic or Orthodox churches, which have become the “mainstream” of world Christianity. But elsewhere, the Church of the East largely ceased to exist, and virtually all its once-famous cities and centers now stand in territories that are largely or exclusively Muslim. By the 1920s, the survivors of this once-vast Nestorian Church, which once attracted the loyalty of Tibetans and Mongols, were reduced to “a miserable community of about forty thousand refugees”24 in northern Iraq. But even then, their sufferings were not at an end. Some years later, they were subjected to massacres so severe as to force legal thinkers to construct a new vocabulary of human savagery. The concept of genocide evolved from discussions of their plight. Timothy’s distant successor today—the catholicos patriarch of the Holy Apostolic Catholic Assyrian Church of the East—is based not in Baghdad, but in Chicago.