The Lost History of Christianity by Phillip Jenkins

The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How it Died

First a complaint: The first couple of chapters could stand some tightening up and getting rid of repetitions. He makes many assertions without adequate examples. And at some point, even if it meant putting in an appendix, he should have laid out the main events in a clear timeline, with explanations of why populations were estimated to be thus-and-so.

I have never read a historian citing Charles Williams' Descent into Hell before to explain the interaction of ancient and modern faith; and I'm delighted to see it (one of my favorite books) though not thoroughly persuaded.

A critical point to bear in mind is that the so-called Nestorian church did not actually follow the condemned doctrine of Nestorius, and apparently was perfectly orthodox on the point of Jesus' nature in the 8'th century. I am not expert on these matters but Jenkins asserts and some others seem to agree that the Nestorian church would be considered as Christian as any other today. Other groups such as Monophysites are a little more problematic technically, though I notice that in practice many Christian churches today wouldn't know how to tell the difference.

So to first order he is writing about Christian churches, even if some of them are supposed to be heretical and had been suppressed within the Roman Empire (West and East). That suppression actually helped some of them spread, because Persian rulers thought that they'd be useful “allies.”

Think of the situation shortly after the church is attacked in Jerusalem. The church is mostly Jews, situated in the eastern section of the Roman empire. To the north are Syrians, and north of them are Greeks, and north and east of them you are outside the boundaries of the Empire among smaller kingdoms. To the south is Egypt and Arabia, and south of Egypt the Nubians (outside the Empire) and beyond them the Ethiopians. The west we know pretty well, though it bears repeating that the Roman empire ran along north Africa as well. To the east is Persia, and beyond Persia India and the plateau Asian tribes, and beyond them along the Silk Road: China.

The Christian gospel went in all directions—and Mesopotamia was far closer than England.

What this account claims is that Christianity reached Edessa very soon after the death of Jesus (*), and that the earliest missionaries stemmed from Antioch. Given the relationships of the cities and trade routes, that general pattern is overwhelmingly likely. The third and fourth leaders of this church were of the family of Joseph, the husband of Mary, and early historians like Eusebius confirm that kinship wish Jesus gave a special warrant for authority in the earliest church. Near the end of the first century, the Roman emperor Domitian sought out the “relatives of the Lord,” the desposynoi, whom he suspected of sedition. On examination, though, the surviving relatives proved to be hard-working small farmers, whom the emperor judged to be unworthy of his attention, and so he let them live. That investigation might well have persuaded any remaining kin to migrate beyond the limits of Roman power, to Parthian Cresiphon—which is just what the Nestorian record suggests. The story also fits well with what we know about Jews relocating to Babylonia in these same years. The account is plausible, in a way that European legends of early apostles and saints are not: no serious historian thinks that Joseph of Arimathea came to Britain, Mary Magdalene to France, or the apostle James to Spain. But the Nestorian sequence does, in contrast, suggest a trajectory that is perfectly credible for the first and second centuries.

(*) an odd choice of words on his part.

The Eastern churches also provide an unexpected witness to current Bible controversies:

The Syriac Bible was a conservative text, to a degree that demands our attention. In recent years, accounts of the early church claim that scriptures and gospels were very numerous, until the mainstream Christian church suppressed most of them in the fourth century. This alleged purge followed the Christian conversion of the emperor Constantine, at a time when the church supposedly wanted to ally with the empire in the interests of promoting order, orthodoxy, and ecclesiastical authority. According to modern legend, the suppressed works included many heterodox accounts of Jesus, which were suspect because of their mystical or even feminine leanings.

The problem with all this is that the Eastern churches had a long familiarity with the rival scriptures, but rejected them early because they knew they were late and tendentious. Even as early as the second century, the Diatssarion assumes four, and only four authentic Gospels. Throughout the Middle Ages, neither Nestorians or 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 of scriptures they wanted to. But instead of adding to the canon, they chose to prune. The Syriac Bible omits several books that are included in the West (2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and the book of Revelation).

Remember the history of the silk industry? In 550AD some monks smuggled silk worms from China to Byzantium. Since the silk industry was supposed to have been tightly guarded in China, the monks must have been there for some time already—which gives an indication of how early missionaries must have arrived there. A formal mission was established in 635, and monasteries spread—but apparently the faith did not have deep roots, for it faded after a Taoist emperor closed the monasteries and expelled officials in the ninth century. (He also got rid of Zoroastrians and Buddhists.) Christianity arrived again after the Mongols conquered China in the thirteenth, but when the Mongols were expelled so were all the “foreign religions” the Mongols had tolerated.

Jenkins describes the church in India as fortunate in not having a lot of history to report. There was a lot of friction when the Portuguese arrived, of course. And not just in India.

So bizarre were the customs of these Easterners, so puritanical, that Ethiopians even looked askance at the Portuguese habit of spitting during church services.

Latins were troubled by the pretensions of these threadbare Christians, who nevertheless claimed such grand titles. In 1550, a Portuguese traveler reported that the forty thousand Christians of the Indian coast owed their allegiance to a head in “Babylon,” the catholicos. Bafflingly, they had not so much as heard of a pope at Rome.

Of course I skipped a block of time here: about a thousand years between Nicea and the Portuguese. That era is the core of this book. The churches had been slowly declining under Muslim rule. Life was harder for dhimmis, and although Jenkins is reluctant to say so outright, quite a few of the attacks on Christians came from below, not from above: the rulers found they had to protect the Christians and Jews from attacks roused by imams. There was an intrinsic conflict that could be roused in times of crisis or austerity. Still, there were something of order 20 million Christians in the Middle East through India at about 1000AD, compared to perhaps 30 million (very much notional) Christians in Europe.

Jenkins says “Though Muslim regimes could tolerate other faiths for long periods, that willingness to live and let live did fail at various times, and at some critical points it collapsed utterly. 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 Ottomans came. Their rulers picked Islam. Perhaps they decided they had to be more Muslim than the Arabs to establish religious/political bona fides: at any rate they tried hard to exterminate Christianity. It does not make pleasant reading. The Mongols arrived on the scene a little later. At one point it was conceivable that their rulers would decide to be Christians: some were. Of course this made Muslims think that Christians were 5'th columnists, which naturally made the Christians hope for external relief. When Timur did overrun the place, it was as a Muslim, and once again Christians were attacked. Timur didn't even treat fellow Muslims well: Christians were really in trouble.

Now came the rise of Europe, and once again local Christians wound up being thought of as possible traitors. The European powers were largely driven by self-interest, but there was some interest in helping fellow Christians: but on certain conditions; such as reorganizing the churches to look to Rome, and changing doctrines and practices: causing new conflicts.

The twentieth century brought the final erasure. The fall of the Ottoman empire seems to have opened the door for both semi-secular powers like the Turks driving out Armenians and extremist Muslim groups like the followers of Wahab and Qutb. The fragmented groups of Christians have been murdered and expelled, and as transportation gets cheaper, have emigrated. Bethlehem now has a fraction of the Christians who lived there only fifty years ago. Turkey and Greece arranged a population swap based on religion. Lebanon is an unstable compromise, and the Christians are now a significant minority in that tiny land.

Jenkins tries to give the Muslim groups the benefit of their excuses: they feared for their religion when outsiders pressed, or they were merely acting the way everyone else did when they aggressed. And he's not eager to admit the long-standing violent streak in Islam. This gets annoying after a while.

He goes on to ask what happens when a religion dies, and dodges around it by suggesting that Christianity left traces in the lands where it vanished. He mentions art and architecture, but realizes that that doesn't cut much ice, and goes on to point out the relationship of Sufism to Christianity: and there are some pretty clear borrowings. He points out that the underground Christians of Japan kept the religion alive for centuries, though when it resurfaced in the twentieth century it had changed a lot. And he notes that because a religion vanishes from a region for a few centuries that doesn't mean it will never return, provided it stays alive elsewhere.

The hierarchical churches could be crushed by decapitation, provided the authorities kept it up long enough. With nobody to consecrate new priests, pretty soon you run out of priests; and nobody gets baptized into the faith, nobody offers communion, and the lay believers, left alone, worry along without what they regard as critical elements of their faith. Jenkins doesn't think that less structured churches are necessarily more robust against persecution, and I suspect he is correct: no organizational scheme is going to be an adequate bulwark.

The more closely a church allies with secular authorities or with some ethnic group, the more protection it has against enemies—but when the secular authorities fail, the church's fate is apt to mirror theirs. A persecuted church may find that the only places it can survive are remote or difficult regions where it runs the risk of growing tied to a particular tribe and losing catholicity.

The great question is why? With no obvious infidelity or besetting vice—or at least none worse than any other—the church in this land or that was driven out and the gospel hidden from the people for centuries. Jenkins has no answer, except to note that centuries come and go and with them kings and empires, but the church is still around and is larger than ever. Just not in its ancient home. And who knows about tomorrow?

I have no answer either, but I know God is just and judges us on what we know; and where the land was taken from light to darkness He will judge the people by how well they follow what little glimmers remain.

I'm looking for more information on the subject, but for an introduction read this book.