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

From the Publisher

In this groundbreaking book, renowned religion scholar Philip Jenkins offers a lost history, revealing that, for centuries, Christianity's center was actually in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, with significant communities extending as far as China. The Lost History of Christianity unveils a vast and forgotten network of the world's largest and most influential Christian churches that existed to the east of the Roman Empire. These churches and their leaders ruled the Middle East for centuries and became the chief administrators and academics in the new Muslim empire. The author recounts the shocking history of how these churches—those that had the closest link to Jesus and the early church—died.

Jenkins takes a stand against current scholars who assert that variant, alternative Christianities disappeared in the fourth and fifth centuries on the heels of a newly formed hierarchy under Constantine, intent on crushing unorthodox views. In reality, Jenkins says, the largest churches in the world were the “heretics” who lost the orthodoxy battles. These so-called heretics were in fact the most influential Christian groups throughout Asia, and their influence lasted an additional one thousand years beyond their supposed demise.

Jenkins offers a new lens through which to view our world today, including the current conflicts in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Without this lost history, we lack an important element for understanding our collective religious past. By understanding the forgotten catastrophe that befell Christianity, we can appreciate the surprising new births that are occurring in our own time, once again makingChristianity a true world religion.

Kirkus Reviews

Deeply erudite, sure-to-be-controversial history of the persecution of Christian churches throughout the world. Before Christianity was a Western European concept, it was Eastern, demonstrates Jenkins (History and Religious Studies/Penn State Univ.; God's Continent, 2007, etc.). The religion took shape first in Syria-Palestine and in Egypt, and until the 13th century, churches extended east from Constantinople to Samarkand and south from Alexandria to the desert of the Ogaden. In fact, what is now the Islamic world was once Christian, and two Eastern churches, the Nestorians and the Jacobites, flourished in Mesopotamia and Syria well into the Middle Ages as repositories of scholarship and spirituality. The author looks at the life and work of the bishop Timothy (d. 823), patriarch of the Church of the East. What we learn about his career "violates everything we think we know about the history of Christianity," Jenkins states. There never was a Dark Ages in the East, which maintained access to texts, science and classical learning. The Church of the East spoke and thought in Syriac, had a rich interaction with other religions and built on the ruins of other great cultures in Persia, Assyria, Babylon and Elam. Much of what we call Arab scholarship, Jenkins asserts, was actually Syriac, Persian and Coptic. Yet with the rise of Islam-and here he begins to tread perilous waters-assaults by Saracen Muslims and pagan Northmen combined to eradicate the Christian world of the East so completely that "its memory is forgotten by all except academic specialists." The author patiently chronicles the subsequent cycle of conversion, discrimination and persecution, studying the remarkable survival of"ghost" churches, like the "hidden Christians" in Japan. Complex material ably digested for the lay reader. Agent: Elyse Cheney/Elyse Cheney Agency

Product Details

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Table of Contents

Read an Excerpt

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

Chapter One

The End of Global Christianity

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.
—Oscar Wilde

Religions die. Over the course of history, some religions vanish altogether, while others are reduced from great world faiths to a handful of adherents. Manichaeanism, a religion that once claimed adherents from France to China, no longer exists in any organized or functional form; nor do the faiths that dominated Mexico and Central America half a millennium ago. In some cases, religions may survive in some parts of the world but are extinguished in territories that they once regarded as entirely their own. For a thousand years, India was mainly Buddhist, a faith that now enjoys only marginal status in that land. Once Persia was Zoroastrian; most of Spain, Muslim. It is not difficult to find countries or even continents, once viewed as natural homelands of a particular faith, where that creed is now extinct, and such disasters are not confined to primal or "primitive" beliefs. The systems that we think of as great world religions are as vulnerable to destruction as was the faith of the Aztecs or Mayans in their particular gods.¹

Christianity, too, has on several occasions been destroyed in regions where it once flourished. In most cases, the elimination has been so thorough as to obliterate any memory that Christians were ever there, so that today any Christian presence whatsoever in theseparts is regarded as a kind of invasive species derived from the West. Yet such a comment about the destruction of churches runs contrary to the story of Christianity as it features in the popular consciousness.

Usually, this history is presented as a tale of steady expansion, from the Middle East to Europe and ultimately onto the global stage. Christianity appears to have spread freely and inexorably, so that we rarely think of major reverses or setbacks. When we do hear of disasters or persecutions, they are usually mentioned as the prelude to still greater advances, an opportunity for heroic resistance to oppression. Protestants know how their faith survived all the persecutions and slaughter of the wars of religion; Catholics recall how the worst atrocities inflicted by Protestant and atheist regimes could not silence true belief. Modern observers witness the survival of the churches under Communism, and the ultimate triumph symbolized by Pope John Paul II. As the hymn teaches, truth will endure, in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword.²

Anyone familiar with Christian history has read of the planting, rise, and development of churches, but how many know accounts of the decline or extinction of Christian communities or institutions? Most Christians would find the very concept unsettling. Yet such events have certainly occurred, and much more often than many realize. During the later Middle Ages, mass defections and persecutions across Asia and the Middle East uprooted what were then some of the world's most numerous Christian communities, churches that possessed a vibrant lineal and cultural connection to the earliest Jesus movement of Syria and Palestine. Seventeenth-century Japan thoroughly eliminated a Christian presence that had come close to becoming a real force in the country, possibly even to achieving a national conversion. Repeatedly through its history, the church's tree has been pruned and cut back, often savagely.³

These episodes of removal or mass destruction have profoundly shaped the character of the Christian faith. In modern times, we are accustomed to thinking of Christianity as traditionally based in Europe and North America, and only gradually do we learn the strange concept of the religion spreading to the global stage as Christian numbers swell in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. So grounded is Christianity in the Western inheritance that it seems almost revolutionary to contemplate this kind of globalization, with all its potential impact on theology, art, and liturgy. A faith primarily associated with Europe somehow has to adapt to this wider world, adjusting many assumptions drawn from European culture. Some even ask whether this new global or world Christianity will remain fully authentic, as European norms seem to represent a kind of gold standard.⁴

But such questions are ironic when we realize how unnatural the Euro-American emphasis is when seen against the broader background of Christian history. The particular shape of Christianity with which we are familiar is a radical departure from what was for well over a millennium the historical norm: another, earlier global Christianity once existed. 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. Christianity became predominantly European not because this continent had any obvious affinity for that faith, but by default: Europe was the continent where it was not destroyed. Matters could easily have developed very differently.

In describing the fall of the non-European churches, I am not offering a lament for a worldwide Christian hegemony that never was, still less for a failure to resist rival religions such as Islam. We should rather regret the destruction of a once-flourishing culture, much as we mourn the passing of Muslim Spain, Buddhist India, or the Jewish worlds of eastern Europe. With the possible exception of a few particularly bloody or violent creeds, the destruction of any significant faith tradition is an irreplaceable loss to human experience and culture. Furthermore, the Christian experience offers lessons that can be applied more generally to the fate of other religions that have suffered persecution or elimination. 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.

Above all, rediscovering the lost Christian worlds of Africa and Asia raises sobering questions about the nature of historical memory. How can we possibly have forgotten such a vast story? In terms of the story of Christianity, which we usually associate so centrally with the making of "the West," much of what we think we know is inaccurate, in terms of the places and times at which things happened and how religious change occurred. Moreover, many aspects of Christianity that we conceive as thoroughly modern were in fact the norm in the distant past: globalization, the encounter with other faiths, and the dilemmas of living under hostile regimes. How can our mental maps of the past be so radically distorted?