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

For many modern observers, this coronation symbolizes much that is distasteful about the story of Christianity: its alliance with state power, its thoroughly European nature, and its arrogant isolation from other faiths and cultures.

Iraq was through the late Middle Ages at least as much a cultural and spiritual heartland of Christianity as was France or Germany, or indeed Ireland.

If we are ever tempted to speculate on what the early church might have looked like if it had developed independently, avoiding the mixed blessing of its alliance with Roman state power, we have but to look east.

Our accepted chronology of the ancient church is wrong: ancient Semitic Christianity dies out not in the fourth century, but in the fourteenth.8

these mystical and speculative ideas flourished—together with their distinctive lost Gospels—until they were largely suppressed during the fourth century, following the Council of Nicea.

To appreciate the full diversity of the Christian experience, it is eye-opening to think what was happening in western Europe at this exact time. 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’s famous dialogue with the caliph al-Mahdi survives as a precious monument of civilized, intelligent religious exchange.

In the same way, Timothy said, the pearl of true faith had fallen into the transient mortal world, and each faith naively believed that it alone possessed it.

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. It was Christians—Nestorian, Jacobite, Orthodox, and others—who preserved and translated the cultural inheritance of the ancient world—the science, philosophy, and medicine—and who transmitted it to centers like Baghdad and Damascus. Much of what we call Arab scholarship was in reality Syriac, Persian, and Coptic, and it was not necessarily Muslim.

Syriac Christians even make the first reference to the efficient Indian numbering system that we know today as “Arabic,” and long before this technique gained currency among Muslim thinkers.17

Timothy would probably have felt little hope for the future of Christianity in western Europe.

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 Magyars from the east: Christians had nowhere left to hide. Perhaps history would ultimately write off the Christian venture into western Europe as rash overreach, a diversion from Christianity’s natural destiny, which evidently lay in Asia. Europe might have been a continent too far.

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.

The disasters of the late Middle Ages tore Christianity from its roots—cultural, geographical, and linguistic. This “uprooting” created the Christianity that we commonly think of today as the true historical norm, but which in reality was the product of the elimination of alternative realities. Christianity did indeed become “European,” but about a millennium later than most people think.

To offer a parallel example to understand how radical the uprooting of Christianity was, we would have to imagine a counterfactual world in which Islam was extinguished in Arabia and the Middle East, and survived chiefly in Southeast Asia, using scriptures translated into Malay and Bengali. Christianity is just as severed from its original context.

if Christianity has no historic core, how can we speak of a “mainstream,” a historic norm or standard against which later movements or positions can be judged?

Yet even on an issue as basic as the Person of Christ, what we today call mainstream historical orthodoxy looks more like the view that happened to gain power in Europe, and which therefore survived.

Nestorians and Jacobites remained very influential for over eight hundred years after the great church councils expelled them from the imperial fold, and they attracted believers over a huge geographical area. To put that achievement in context, that time span is far longer than the entire history of Protestantism to date.

The success of a particular religion or faith tradition in gaining numbers and influence neither proves nor disproves its validity.

Dechristianization is one of the least studied aspects of Christian history.27

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.

such pious book burning is the reason so few written records survive of the Aztec and Mayan religions.

While religions might sicken and fade, they do not die of their own accord: they must be killed.

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.

the fourteenth century witnessed a crescendo of violence and discrimination. Muslims attacked Christians as subversives and traitors, even accusing them of plotting mega–terror attacks on beloved mosques and public monuments. Such theories became plausible with the introduction of the new superweapon of gunpowder.30

Egyptian Christianity became native; its African counterpart was colonial. This difference became crucial when a faith that was formed in one set of social and political

Only by understanding the lost Eastern Christianities can we understand where Islam comes from, and how very close it is to Christianity.

Look at history in the Dark Ages. Charlemagne converted whole tribes by the sword.”

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. Describing the arrival of Theodore and Hadrian from the Mediterranean, Bede records that “[f]rom that time also, they began in all the churches of the English to learn Church music.” What we call

Gregorian chant is a later synthesis of these local musical traditions, which ultimately stemmed from Syria.7

The ecclesiastical hierarchy closely mirrored the old imperial structure of cities and provinces, and when that empire faded away, the Christian church survived on its ruins.

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 That regime did not last long, but neighboring Armenia made this the official religion around the year 300 and retains the faith until the present day.

the link with that foreign government made life difficult for Christians living under the rule of the rival superpower of the time. (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

fifth-century splits over the relationship between Christ’s human and divine natures.

In 591, the Byzantines were puzzled to find that Turkish envoys from Kyrgyzstan had crosses tattooed on their foreheads: “They had been assigned this by their mothers; for when a fierce plague was endemic among them, some Christians advised them that the foreheads of the young be tattooed with that sign.”39

Poland accepted Christianity in 966, while Norway and Sweden were in the process of conversion only around

Lithuania accepted the new religion, as late as the 1380s.