The Lost History of Christianity

    Another sunny, but slightly cooler day in late summer. Another book review of a fairly recently finished read. This one is by Philip Jenkins. One of my favorite authors. My opinion is that you, dear reader, will enjoy just about anything by Jenkins, especially his works on where Christianity is going and where it has been.
    And this book review is one concerning his The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia-and How it Died.  Published by Harper Collins in 2008, I waited until the more affordable paperback was available. The longish title says what the subject is. The "lost" adjective refers to the general ignorance that we in the Occidental Church, long under the spell of Rome, have of our ancient antecedents in the Orient. The Oriental churches (multiple, very multiple) were long deprecated by Rome, and then forgotten (if even known) to the Reformation & the Protestant movement. The Great Schism between the church in Rome and that of Constantinople (1050) is only part of what happened between Occident and Orient. The Orthodox church of Constantinople was only a very small representation of the tremendous breadth and depth of the Church(es) Oriental.
   The ancient churches of the Orient stretched from the Middle East through the (now modern) areas of Iran, Iraq, India, Afghanistan, Central Asia and all the way to ancient China. And beyond to even Japan. [Don't let the missions of the Jesuits to China in the 15th-17th centuries fool you, there were Christian missionaries in what is now modern China nearly 1000 years before.] We of the Occidental lineage after having our notions of what is 'orthodox' for Western Christianity certainly would consider the Oriental versions of Christianity to be quite heterodox. But Christian they were. They professed Christ. And a host of other beliefs that just don't fit into our western mindset.
   So what happened to what was clearly the largest segment of Christianity? While Europe was still largely pagan before 1000 CE (A.D.) there were far, far more Christians to the east and in Africa. Jenkins spends a large chunk of the book on "what happened?"  The largest single disaster to hit the Christian communities was the rise of Islam. For long years after the Islamic conquest of what we now call "the Middle East", the Christians lived in relative harmony with Muslims. However, as the Islamic faith hardened things were more difficult. Worse was the negative response of the Islamic communities to the invasions of the "Christian" Crusades from the west. In an effort to resist the Crusades (a phenomenon of Western Christianity) the Oriental Christians were suppressed and worse. The invasion of the Mongols into the region was also a complication.
   Jenkins also asks "how/why did the Christian communities of Egypt, the Coptics, survive when all the rest were obliterated?" His answer has to do with the observation that in most of the Orient that the Christian missionaries established the church largely among the ruling class. The idea (also common in Europe) was "first convert the king, and then you've got the whole country..."   According to Jenkins this was widely true from the ancient Middle East through central Asia. So when 'regime change' came with the Islamic invasions, the same process resulted in "conversion" of the conquered countries. What was different of the Coptics is that the religion took root in the base communities first. Thus it is that the Coptic church in Egypt still survives (though quite precariously) today over 1300 years after the arrival of Islam. Quoting the book (p.229-230) "Where the African church (Carthage) failed was in not carrying Christianity beyond the Romanized inhabitants of the cities and the great estates, and not sinking roots into the world of the native peoples. ....  ...the African church had made next to no progress in taking the faith to the villages and neighboring tribes, nor, critically, had they tried toe evangelize in local languages."  The difference in Egypt was that early on there was an effort to take Christianity into the countryside.
   Thus a fascinating book that speaks to efforts to evangelize in other parts of the world, especially of native peoples. A top --> down evangelization effort that focuses on the city folk simply can't get into the countryside. In large swaths of Latin America we see sharp distinctions between the city and the countryside. It isn't just economic. But cultural. Even the language is completely different in the ancient Maya areas of Central America, of the Aymara & Quechua peoples from Ecuador through Peru and Bolivia into northern Argentina & Chile.  So it is that I got a lot out of this book. RECOMMENDED READING!