The Lost History of Christianity

“For most of its history, Christianity was a tricontinental religion, with powerful representation in Europe, Africa, and Asia, and this was true into the fourteenth century.”

“Because of its location — close to the Roman frontier, but just far enough beyond it to avoid heavy-handed interference — Mesopotamia or Iraq retained a powerful Christian culture at least through the thirteenth century.”

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

When we look at our maps of early Christianity, they tend to go from Jerusalem to the West. For in our imaginations, Christianity is basically about the Middle East and Europe.

But that presumption is completely wrong, as Philip Jenkins (author of the earlier The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity) has shown unequivocally in The Lost History of Christianity.

This book is worth getting and digesting. I plan to whet your appetite with a few posts in the coming days.

Though my study of Asian and African Christianity is deficient, I was exposed to it through a class I audited with Jeff Childers, a world-class Syriac scholar and early church historian, a few years ago on evangelism in the early centuries. Since that class, I’ve joked with Jeff about how we all know that the heart of Christianity is Edessa.

As it turns out, that’s not far off. There was a vibrancy in the churches of Asia and Africa that has often been overlooked — a vibrancy that lasted well into what we ignorantly call “the Dark Ages.”

As Jenkins points out, Semitic Christianity hardly died in the first few centuries, as many imagine; rather it flourished for over a thousand years. “The Syriac churches represent the ultimate lost Christianity.”

Often the minority in the East (Asia Minor, Iraq, Iran, India, China), these Christians engaged in meaningful dialogue with Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism — as well as with Judaism. “These believers were well accustomed to a modern idea of Christianity as a minority faith operating far from centers of power, usually suffering official discrimination, and facing the recurrent danger of persecution.”

“[The 8th/9th century Christian leader] 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. . . . Eastern Christians dominated the cultural and intellectual life of what was only slowly becoming the ‘Muslim world,’ and that 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. It was Christians . . . 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.”

Tragically, somewhere in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Christianity suffered a severe blow in Asia and Africa. Between 1200 and 1500 the number of Asian Christians fell from 21 million to 3.4 million. This “brutal purge of Christianity” by oppressive politics left Europe as the only base of expansion for Christianity.

Christianity was “severed from its original context,” he notes. It would be as if Muslims were wiped out of Arabia and the Middle East and forced to relocate in SE Asia, with scriptures translated into Malay and Bengali.

What changed? A sort of jihad mentality among Muslims. Jenkins works hard to show that this isn’t necessarily in the DNA of Islam (noting the generous nature of Muslim rule for many centuries) and that this isn’t unique to Islam (pointing out similar military theologies among Christians, Hindus, and Buddhists).

The fourteenth century was filled with “a crescendo of violence and discrimination.”

“Around the world, in fact, the years around 1300 produced an appalling trend toward religious and ethnic intolerance, a movement that must be explained in terms of global factors, rather than merely local. The aftereffects of the Mongol invasions certainly played their part, by terrifying Muslims and others with the prospect of a direct threat to their social and religious power. Climatic factors were also critical, as the world entered a period of rapid cooling, precipitating bad harvests and shrinking trade routes: a frightened and impoverished world looks for scapegoats. For whatever reasons, Muslim regimes and mobs now delivered near-fatal blows to weakened Christian churches. 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.”

An interesting piece of this history is that while Christianity was killed off in many areas (except for the powerful force of “Crypto-Christianity” — covert and clandestine believers!), the faith continued to thrive in the Coptic churches of Egypt. Why there and not in other places?

“The key difference making for survival is rather how deep a church planted its roots in a particular community, and how far the religion became part of the air that ordinary people breathed. The Egyptian church succeeded wonderfully in this regard, while the Africans failed to make much impact beyond the towns. While the Egyptians put the Christian faith in the language of the ordinary people, from city dwellers through peasants, the Africans concentrated only on certain categories, certain races. Egyptian Christianity became native; its African counterpart was colonial.”

More later . . . .