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

Today, they survive only as fragmentary remains under Iraqi village mosques.38 To the Ends of the Earth By

the seventh century, the Nestorians had an elaborate network of provinces and dioceses in Persia and neighboring lands, and they were naturally looking north and east. After all, the Persian Empire then stretched deep into central Asia, into the far western territories of what is now China. Already by the sixth century, Christian missionaries were reaching into the heart of Asia, and from the very beginning they recognized the need for vernacular scriptures, inventing alphabets where necessary.

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. One hymn urges: Travel well girt like merchants, That we may gain the world. Convert men to me, Fill creation with teaching. Such merchants also brought the Syriac language.

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. In creating the Western silk industry, this act was of revolutionary economic significance, but the religious implications are harder to assess.

The earliest formal mission can be dated to 635, when missionaries reached the Chinese imperial capital of Ch'ang-an, establishing a mission that endured for over two hundred years.

Indeed, this mission would be destroyed

in the mid–ninth century when the Taoist emperor Wuzong condemned and expelled foreign religions and closed monasteries.

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.

Another scene of Nestorian successes was in 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. In 550, Cosmas reported, from firsthand observation, that [e]ven in Taprobanê [Sri Lanka], an island in Further India, where the Indian Sea is, there is a church of Christians, with clergy and a body of believers, but I know not whether there be any Christians in the parts beyond it. In the country called Malê [Malabar], where the pepper grows, there is also a church, and at another place called Calliana there is moreover a bishop, who is appointed from Persia.47 India by this time had an indigenous church with its own hierarchy.

Indonesia and Southeast Asia. Scholars have speculated on possible Nestorian ventures into Burma, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Korea.49

All these churches, moreover, saw monasticism as the highest form of the Christian life.

Monasticism probably originated in third-century Egypt, spreading to Mesopotamia through the work of Saint Eugenios,

monasticism soon became integral to Eastern Christian practice. Throughout the East, Christians were entranced by the vision of saints as ascetic holy men and women, spiritual warriors who were uniquely qualified to confront the demons who threatened humanity at every stage of life.

Syrian and Mesopotamian Christians were influenced by Persian dualist ideas that were so commonplace in local culture. This promoted “a religion of intense moral seriousness, of spiritual athleticism, that spoke to a community marked by the eternal conflict of the principles of Light and Darkness and by the realities of death and judgment.”

At least through the end of the eighth century, the Syriac churches still had stylites, solitaries dwelling high on pillars. And the old ways continued deep into the high Middle Ages. About 1270, for instance, we hear of Bar Sauma, a Nestorian monk in China who set apart a cell for himself and he shut himself up therein seven years; and after that [period] he decided to remove himself from the children of men, and to practice himself in the ascetic life in the mountain, in a place which was wholly isolated, so that he might rest there [undisturbed] in his life as a recluse.3

Ideas of solitude, inner contemplation, and even the quest for divinity pervade the stories and teachings of the Egyptian hermits, stories that were passed down over the centuries and are easily available in the work known as the Philokalia, collected during the eighteenth century.

“God became man so that men might become gods.”

Personal sacrifice and asceticism led to sanctity, which was manifested in healings and miracles.

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.

It was at Nisibis that much of the ancient world’s learning was kept alive and translated, making it available for later generations of Muslim scholars, and for Europeans after them. Among other classical works, Nisibis preserved the writings of Aristotle and his commentators.

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.

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.

Mosul. He managed in a single life to be “philosopher, poet, grammarian, physician, Biblical commentator, historian, and theologian,” and he can reasonably be mentioned in the same breath as his contemporaries Thomas Aquinas and Roger Bacon.

Bar-Hebraeus somehow managed to accomplish all this while the rest of the known world was being torn apart by the Mongol invasions and the ensuing wars. He even wrote a collection of witty sayings and tales, the Laughable Sayings, which are striking for the very broad range of settings and cultures on which they draw. Living in the cosmopolitan Mesopotamia of his day, he drew on the wit of Persian, Indian, and Hebrew sages, Greek philosophers, Christian recluses, Muslim kings, and Arab ascetics—not to mention irrational beasts, clowns and simpletons, lunatics and demoniacs.19

late twelfth century as the age of Queen Tamara, who subdued neighboring Muslim states and presided over the great age of Georgian writing and poetry.

Mosul boasted the tombs of three biblical prophets: Obadiah, Nahum, and Jonah.

According to a widely credited legend, when Abgar, king of Edessa, was suffering from an incurable disease, he wrote seeking the help of “Jesus, the Good Physician Who has appeared in the country of Jerusalem.”

In the nineteenth century, intrepid European and American travelers visited the declining monasteries of the upper Tigris and commented on how often Kurds and other Muslim tribes raided the premises, taking papers and parchments that they might use for loading rifles or starting fires.

The Syriac Bible omits several books that are included in the West (2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and the book of Revelation).

some historians believe that Nestorian missionaries influenced the religious practices of the Buddhist religion then developing in Tibet.

When seventeenth-century Catholic travelers speculated that the lamas they encountered were distant spiritual descendants of ancient Christian churches, they may have been more right than they knew.

He established his patriarchal seat at Maragha near Tabriz, the capital of the Mongol Ilkhan dynasty, and from there he ruled thirty provinces and 250 bishoprics.

we can properly see the fourteenth century as marking the decisive collapse of Christianity in the Middle East, across Asia, and in much of Africa.

Jews were prohibited entry into England from 1290 until the 1650s, and Christian Spain expelled both its Muslims and its Jews.

The deeply rooted Christianity of Africa and Asia did not simply fade away through lack of zeal, or theological confusion: it was crushed, in a welter of warfare and persecution.

the North African church based in Carthage had at its height been one of the most powerful and influential in the whole of Christianity, yet very soon after the Muslims took Carthage in 698, that church vanished almost totally.

After seeing the Persians overrun their whole eastern empire by 616, the Romans had staged a stunning comeback in which they in turn destroyed Persian power. Even when Roman armies were not

“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.”

One ninth-century Nestorian chronicle was lyrical: “The hearts of Christians rejoiced at the ascendancy of the Arabs. May God affirm and make it triumphant!” Whatever the faults of the Arabs, at least they were not Christian Byzantines.

For much of the eighth century, Christian icons and paintings were much safer under Arab rule than they were in Byzantine territory, then dominated by the Iconoclastic movement.

at the end of the tenth century, when the Egyptian-based caliph Hakim launched an unprecedented systematic persecution of Christians and Jews, and three thousand churches were destroyed or converted into mosques—an important move in a country where village churches were still at least as common as Muslim sites.

in 1009 he destroyed Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and Christians were forbidden to visit the site for forty years.

before the twelfth century, the Eastern churches found little difficulty in maintaining their organizations, in operating their churches and monasteries, or in launching new mission ventures beyond the borders of Muslim political authority.

In a characteristic document from 1138, a caliph recognized a new catholicos, giving him authority over the various Christian sects:

The caliphs were surrounded by Christian or crypto-Christian courtiers, including many doctors, scribes, and scholars.

Islam made little impact on populations outside Arabia before the mid–eighth century, but then grew steadily.