The Lost History of Christianity:



The Lost History of Christianity:

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

1. The End of Global Christianity

2. Churches of the East

3. Another World

4. The Great Tribulation

5. The Last Christians

6. Ghosts of a Faith

7. How Faiths Die

8. The Mystery of Survival

9. Endings and Beginnings

The End of Global Christianity

If a faith as vigorous and pervasive as Middle Eastern or Asian Christianity could have fallen into such total oblivion, no religion is safe. And the means by which such an astonishing fall occurred should be of keen interest to anyone contemplating the future of any creed or denomination.

About 780, the bishop Timothy became patriarch of the Church of the East, which was then based at the ancient Mesopotamian city of Seleucia.

The Syriac churches represent the ultimate lost Christianity.

Before Good King Wenceslas ruled a Christian Bohemia, before Poland was Catholic, the Nestorian sees of Bukhara, Samarkand, and Patna all achieved metropolitan status. Our common mental maps of Christian history omit a thousand years of that story. We can’t understand Christian history without Asia—or, indeed, Asian history without Christianity.

Together, Buddhist and Nestorian scholars worked amiably together for some years to translate seven copious volumes of Buddhist wisdom.

Timothy lived in a universe that was culturally and spiritually Christian but politically Muslim, and he coped quite comfortably with that situation. As faithful subjects, the patriarch and his clergy prayed for the caliph and his family. The catholicos was a key figure at the court of the Muslim caliph.

“Imagine that we are all of us as in a dark house in the middle of the night. If at night and in a dark house, a precious pearl happens to fall in the midst of people, and all become aware of its existence, every one would strive to pick up the pearl, which will not fall to the lot of all but to the lot of one only, while one will get hold of the pearl itself, another one of a piece of glass, a third one of a stone or of a bit of earth, but every one will be happy and proud that he is the real possessor of the pearl. When, however, night and darkness disappear, and light and day arise, then every one of those people who had believed that they had the pearl, would extend and stretch their hand towards the light, which alone can show what everyone has in hand. The one who possesses the pearl will rejoice and be happy and pleased with it, while those who had in hand pieces of glass and bits of stone only will weep and be sad, and will sigh and shed tears.”

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.

For several centuries after the original conquests, the great majority of those who accepted Islam converted quite voluntarily, for the usual range of reasons that explain such a transformation: some changed their religions for convenience or advantage, but most because they accepted the claims of the new religion to provide a definitive revelation of God’s will. Many ordinary people probably accepted Islam for the same reason that their ancestors had become Christian—namely, that they followed the lead of local lords or other notables. 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. From the tenth century onward, many prospective converts were attracted by the example of Muslim saints and sages, whose charismatic powers recalled those of earlier Christian saints.

Most of the lands conquered by Islam during the initial expansion of that faith were at the time heavily Christian, and large sections of the population retained that loyalty until intolerable pressures drove them to accept conversion. Only around 1300 did the axe fall, and quite suddenly.

Even today, jihadi extremists look back to the hard-line Muslim scholars of this very era as their role models in challenging the infidel world.

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