Philip Jenkins. The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died. New York: Harper, 2008. Print.

A friend asked me recently what I had been reading. I told him a little about Finding God in Ancient China. He went to his bookcase and pulled out a copy of The Lost History of Christianity for me to read.

Although the book is less than 270 pages excluding references, it has far too much to go into detail here. The book describes the growth of the Christian Church to the east and south of the Holy Land to about the fourteenth century. Today much of the world sees Christianity as a Western or European religion. But until the fourteenth century that was not necessarily so.

The historical record tells us that most of Greater Syria, the Persian Empire, Arabia, North Africa, the Sudan, and the Horn of Africa was Christian. Christians were well-established in Central Asia in what today are the “stans.” At least three times Christianity was established in China before the 1700s. It spread in India, Sri Lanka, and on to the Pacific Ocean.

Most of these churches were Nestorian, Jacobite, or Monophysite churches. Most of these were wiped out or disappeared, though remnants of some of them persist. Only in Egypt and Ethiopia can these churches be considered at least somewhat vigorous today. The author is careful to point out that these are not gnostic or Arian groups. These are all churches that would subscribe to the Nicene Council and the doctrine of the Trinity.

The record of missionary zeal and scholarship that Jenkins describes is extraordinary from a modern perspective. It is truly a nearly lost history. Westerners generally learn that Europeans rediscovered Aristotle and other Greek writers at the time of the Crusades thanks to commerce with Arabs. What Jenkins tells us is that most of these ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians—even the use of “Arabic” numbers, which actually originated in India—were translated or brought to light by Christian monks in the Arabic world of the Middle Ages. Even the distinctive architecture associated today with mosques and the Near East came from Mesopotamian and Arabic church design prior to Islam.

One brief account near the beginning of the book was about a Mesopotamian Bishop Timothy who wrote around the year 800. He was made privy to a discovery of Hebrew and Aramaic manuscripts that showed that many of the heretofore puzzling quotations of the Hebrew Scriptures in the New Testament were based on non-Masoretic texts. Jenkins notes that no Catholic (which would still have included the Orthodox) would have even understood the issue in A.D. 800. This information and these manuscripts disappeared a long time ago, and it was not until the Dead Sea Scrolls began to be interpreted in the 1950s would people rediscover what had been known to these Eastern Christians back then.

Approximately the first half of The Lost History of Christianity describes the spread of Christianity to the East and South in the First Millennium. The Nestorians had hundreds of bishops throughout India, Central Asia, the Near East, and Arabia. There was even a bishop in Yemen. So what happened?

There is no one answer. The early Muslim conquests, for example, were often tolerant to some degree. In many cases Christians and Jews became top advisors to their new rulers because they were more literate and educated. They often knew multiple languages which made them useful for diplomacy. However, their position became more precarious as a more radical form of Islam emerged around the 12th century.

Also, in many places Christians were centered in cities. When an invading army conquered a city, often the whole city was destroyed including its Christians. As with Viking raids in the British Isles, monasteries were sometimes seen as easy marks for plunder.

Sometimes Christians were identified with a particular faction and became victims when another group rose in power. The Mongols tolerated Christians, and Christianity may have had its widest influence in Central and East Asia during their rule. When the Mongols were overthrown by Tamerlane and other Turkic groups that followed, Christians were seen as allies of the enemy.

The last surge against Christians which ended with the Turkish conquest of Byzantium and what was left of the Arab kingdoms was probably the most devastating. The Egyptian church survived because it was so closely identified with Egypt (Coptic means “Egyptian,” and has the same root). Other churches may have survived as minority outposts when, like the Maronites of Lebanon, they allied themselves with the Roman Catholic Church.

Sometimes the churches themselves had become so much identified with the non-Christian cultural system, that church members no longer saw the distinctiveness of their belief. This was sometimes the case when Christians converted to Islam or Buddhism in cultures where those religions were the primary ones. Jenkins suggest this may account for the numerical decline in American mainline churches during the twentieth century—they became so identified with political or cultural causes rather than religious specifics, that they lost distinctiveness.

Sometimes the church never affected the common people of a region. This was apparently the case in parts of North Africa like Carthage (now Tunisia). When the Arabs conquered this region, the Christian elite who identified with Rome were defeated or left the area, but most of the population was not Christian, so they were open to Islam.

As noted with more detail in Finding God in Ancient China, sometimes the church’s own unwillingness to adapt its evangelism to the native culture made it appear irrelevant or foreign. This happened in the 16th century after Father Matteo Ricci was having success showing that Christianity was the fulfillment of the ancient monotheistic sacrificial system of the Chinese. After this, the Pope told missionaries to China that they could not operate that way.

Jenkins notes that significant churches in the Near East have been eliminated or drastically reduced in the 20th and 21st centuries. The nationalist and Baathist movements wiped out the majority of Christians in Armenia and Iraq in the years 1915 to 1930. In recent years Pan-Arabism, which had included Christians in such countries as Egypt and Palestine, has been transformed into a pan-Islamism so that Christians are being marginalized in these places. In some places they are persecuted or reduced in status, their churches destroyed, and sometimes they have been killed. When they can afford it, they leave.

The author still sees potential for the church beyond an apocalyptic confrontation between Christianity and Islam with its secular allies. The church has grown greatly in much of the world’s South, in Africa and Latin America. The church in China and former Warsaw Pact countries learned to survive underground. As G. K. Chesterton said:

At least five times…the Faith to all appearance gave to the dogs. In each of the five cases, it was the dog that died. (The Everlasting Man II.vi)

Or as the prophet Isaiah said about the Messiah:

Of the increase of his government and peace there will be no end. (9:7)