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spiritual powerhouse of Ireland.
For scholars like Elaine Pagels, Bart Ehrman, and Karen King, these mystical and speculative ideas flourished—together
Eastern Christians also continued to pursue mystical quests in ways that were familiar in the early church, and they did so long after the fourth century.
the church was growing in southern India, where believers claimed a direct inheritance from the missions of the apostle Thomas.
Our common mental maps of Christian history omit a thousand years of that story, and several million square miles of territory.
Adam had already translated parts of the Bible into Chinese, and the two probably shared a knowledge of Persian. Together, Buddhist and Nestorian scholars worked amiably together for some years to translate seven copious volumes of Buddhist wisdom.
The year 782 marked one of the worst horrors of Charlemagne’s reign, the reputed beheading of forty-five hundred Saxons who resisted the Frankish campaign of forced conversion to Catholic Christianity.
Timothy lived in a universe that was culturally and spiritually Christian but politically Muslim, and he coped quite comfortably with that situation.
Eastern Christians played such a critical role in building Muslim politics and culture, and they still had a near stranglehold over the ranks of administration. Their wide linguistic background made the Eastern churches invaluable resources for rising empires in search of diplomats, advisers, and scholars. Eastern Christians dominated the cultural and intellectual life of what was only
slowly becoming the “Muslim world,” and this cultural strength starkly challenges standard assumptions about the relationship between the two faiths. It is common knowledge that medieval Arab societies were far ahead of those of Europe in terms of science, philosophy, and medicine, and that Europeans derived much of their scholarship from the Arab world; yet in the early centuries, this cultural achievement was usually Christian and Jewish rather than Muslim.
Much of what we call Arab scholarship was in reality Syriac, Persian, and Coptic, and it was not necessarily Muslim. Syriac-speaking Christian scholars brought the works of Aristotle to the Muslim world: Timothy himself translated Aristotle’s Topics from Syriac into Arabic, at the behest of the caliph.
It was during Timothy’s time that Baghdad became a legendary intellectual center, with the caliph’s creation of the famous House of Wisdom, the fountainhead of later Islamic scholarship. But this was the direct successor of the Christian “university” of Jundishapur, and it borrowed many Nestorian scholars. One early head of the House of Wisdom was the Christian Arab Hunayn, who began the massive project of translating the Greek classics into Arabic: the works of Plato, Aristotle, and the Neoplatonists, as well as medical authorities like Hippocrates and Galen.
Any reasonable projection of the Christian future would have foreseen a bipolar world, divided between multiethnic churches centered respectively in Constantinople and Baghdad.
Timothy would probably have felt little hope for the future of Christianity in western Europe. Already in Timothy’s last days, Charlemagne’s vaunted empire was fragmenting, and falling prey to the combined assaults of pagan Northmen and Muslim Saracens. In the century after 790, ruin and massacre overtook virtually all the British and Irish monasteries that had kept learning alive over the previous two centuries, and from which missionaries had gone out to evangelize northern Europe. Spain was already under Muslim rule, and southern Italy and southern France seemed set to follow. In 846,
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Latin Europe’s low point came soon after 900 when, within the space of a couple of years, areas of central France were ravaged in quick succession by pagan Vikings from the north, Muslim Moors from the south, and pagan ...
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According to one estimate, the number of Asian Christians fell, between 1200 and 1500, from 21 million to 3.4 million.
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.
The founding text of Christian history is the Church History by Eusebius, who pieced together every snippet of information, legend, and gossip he could find about the origins of the burgeoning Christian movement of the fourth century. John Foxe, in the sixteenth century, was no less dedicated to collecting details about all the heroes and martyrs whose sacrifices laid the foundations for the new Protestant churches.28
Conversion was all the easier because, in these early centuries, Islam bore a much closer resemblance to Christianity than it would in later eras, making the transition less radical.
Nothing in Muslim scriptures makes the faith of Islam any more or less likely to engage in persecution or forcible conversion than any other world religion.
Gradually, after three or four centuries, Muslims came to constitute majorities, usually through peaceful means.
Muslim regimes and mobs now delivered near-fatal blows to weakened Christian churches.
Anyone who believes that boundless aggression and ruthless tyranny over minorities are built into the DNA of Islam needs to explain the quite benevolent nature of Muslim rule during its first six centuries; but advocates of Islamic tolerance must work just as hard to account for the later years of the religion’s historical experience.
So extensive, indeed, were persecutions and reductions of minority groups, from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century, that it is astonishing how little they have registered in popular consciousness, or how readily the myth of Muslim tolerance has been accepted.
The film shows us the last two members of the indigenous hereditary priesthood, both frail men in their nineties, the distant successors of Saint Francis Xavier and the Jesuit pioneers.
The Christian impact on Islam was profound, and can be traced at the deepest roots of that faith. 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.
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.
Many Europeans worry that a decline of Christian loyalties will be followed not by a nonjudgmental secular utopia, but by a society increasingly dominated by harsh forms of Islam, reinforced by threats of armed terror and mob violence.
East. Eastern cities like Antioch, Edessa, and Nisibis were the glories of the Christian world.
Syria, after all, has a strong claim to be the source of Christian music.
Armenia made this the official religion around the year 300 and retains the faith until the present day.
Ani has been a ghost town for centuries, enough ruins of cathedrals, churches, basilicas, and monasteries survive to give some impression of “the city of 1,001 churches.”
Georgia was converted shortly after Armenia, and both lands have left a splendid heritage in the form of ancient churches and monasteries, not to mention Christian manuscript art.
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.
Ethiopia.19 When Europeans discovered the country in the seventeenth century, they were astounded by the degree of Christian devotion.
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 So rich is Ethiopia’s
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awe-inspiring rock-hewn churches built in the thirteenth century that are among the miracles of medieval architecture.
The medieval ruling dynasty claimed descent from Solomon and the queen of Sheba, and this history was elaborated in the fourteenth-century chronicle the Kebra Nagast.
Ethiopia tried to prevent the ongoing persecution in Egypt by threatening to dam the Nile.22 Nestorians and Jacobites When Christians traveled beyond the Roman frontier, they had to leave the protection of the empire, but the very fact of imperial power could be a mixed blessing.
Persia had a substantial Christian presence, concentrated in the south of the country, along the Gulf.
(From the third century through the seventh, Persia was ruled by the powerful Sassanian dynasty.) The Persians responded by executing hundreds of bishops and clergy in a persecution at least as murderous
as anything ever inflicted by pagan Rome: in the fourth century, the Persians killed sixteen thousand Christian believers in a forty-year period.23
Monophysite teachings dominated in Syria and Egypt, and also prevailed in the Christian states of Armenia and Ethiopia.
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.
The Persians, meanwhile, were delighted to discover that so many Roman subjects were disaffected from Roman rule, and they protected these potential enemies of Roman power.
throughout the whole land of Persia there is no limit to the number of churches with bishops and very large communities of Christian people, as well as many martyrs, and monks also living as hermits.28
Legendary Egyptian centers included Saint Catherine’s monastery in Sinai and Saint Antony’s near the Red Sea,
When the Armenian traveler Abû Sâlih offered a travel guide to Egypt’s churches and monasteries around 1200, he was still describing a flourishing network of active monastic houses and pilgrimage shrines that was as extensive as anything in contemporary western Europe.30 MAP 2.2.
we are speaking of the area where Iraq, Turkey, and Syria come together, and where activists now struggle to create a new Kurdistan.
