The Lost History Of Christianity
Philip Jenkins (HarperCollins, 2008)
This is a fascinating book from a trusted and highly readable scholar. It is a story that is both inspiring and sobering, enlightening and disturbing. I highly recommend it.
Having had my appetite for Middle Eastern history whetted again by Rodney Stark’s book, God’s Battalions (see the Ruminations site for my review), I was looking for a reliable guide to the interaction of Christianity and Islam over the centuries – historical research that did not succumb to either romantic naivety nor blatant prejudice regarding the conduct of either Christians or Muslims.
Jenkins has a reputation for dispassionate research and fairmindedness. He seemed a good place to start. His landmark book, The Next Christendom, explored the changing face of Christianity through the twentieth century, as the dominance of the European and North American churches has faded and the churches of the south – African, Asian and South American – have increasingly become the epicentre of the global Christian movement.
This particular book, on the history of Asian, African and Middle-Eastern Christianity over the last two millennia enhances Jenkins’ reputation as a balanced and scrupulously honest historian.
Interestingly, his conclusions mesh well with that of Stark’s. While Stark’s focus is the Crusades, and in particular, the centuries leading up to them, Jenkins paints a much broader historical and geographical canvas. His subtitle gives us a sense of the range of his thesis – “The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle-East, Africa, and Asia – and How it Died.”
Many years ago, in Church History lectures I listened to and books I read, I was told of the vibrancy of the Christian faith in North Africa, Asia Minor (modern day Turkey), Syria, modern-day Iraq and Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and southern India during the centuries after Christ’s death and resurrection.
I was also made aware of the multiple attempts to establish Christianity in China by the Nestorians and the Jesuits, and the vibrancy of the faith in pre-modern Japan during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
However, until I read Jenkins, I did not really appreciate exactly how vibrant and sizeable these expressions of the Christian movement were, nor for how long many of them persisted and thrived. Neither did I understand what caused most of them to ultimately wither and die.
Jenkins tells a convincing story, depicting how they developed, the ways in which they were significant to the Christian story, how they fared under (mainly) Muslim rule, and why they over time largely disappeared.
As a scholar of religion, Jenkins is fascinated by what causes religions to die. In particular, he notes that “Dechristianization is one of the least studied aspects of Christian history” though he goes on to acknowledge that “…the lack of interest in vanishing churches is a matter of practicality, in that dying organisations tend not to produce records of their extinction.” (29)
He maintains that:
The fact that we know so much more about the European churches than their non-European counterparts does not necessarily reflect their greater importance at the time: rather, they survived long enough for scholars to preserve and study their records.(30)
In essence, I think part of the author’s interest in writing this history, is to try and “balance the books” a little – to help those of us in the West who have grown up on a steady diet of Eurocentric church history, to see that for much of the past two millennia there have been other sizeable, influential and vibrant arms of the Church in places other than Europe and North America. For the reality is that,
The familiar image of a western Europe hagridden by popes and clergy is only a tiny part of a much wider global canvas in which many different shades and varieties of Christians coexisted, often suffering oppression: some coped; some succumbed altogether. So vast is this story in its geographical scope, so critical for later religious developments worldwide, that it is astonishing that it has been all but lost. We have a forgotten world. (44)
A forgotten world indeed. So much so, that it seems incredulous to us that the Christian expansion into the East – the Persian Empire and beyond – mirrored what was happening in the West – the Roman Empire. A remarkable story of mission and faith was developing to the East. And these substantial Christian movements thrived for centuries. Yet tragically we have known so little about them.
However, like Stark, Jenkins is keen to “balance the books” in another sense. He writes:
…the historical record on which they [most people] draw is abundantly littered with myths, half-truths, and folk history; historians can, or should, provide a corrective for this. This remark applies particularly to the history of Christianity and of the Christian church, which represents a familiar component of ‘what everybody knows.’…The conventionally negative account of Christian history includes much that is true, in some places and in some times: we need not look far to find religious hatred and anti-Semitism, militarism and corruption. But the story is much more diverse than is commonly believed. (43)
Jenkins’ book is a more measured, less polemic read than that of Stark’s. Nevertheless, there is little about Jenkins’ thesis which contradicts the points Stark makes. Of the rise of Islam Jenkins notes:
Reading sympathetic accounts of the spread of Islam, we can forget that this was a movement of armed conquest and imperial expansion, which on occasion involved ferocious violence. The battle of Yarmuk in 636, which gave the Muslims control of Syria, was one of the great military massacres of antiquity, costing the lives of perhaps fifty thousand soldiers of the Christian Byzantine Empire. (101)
The seizing of large territory by Muslim forces over the following centuries didn’t automatically result in a swift and painless process of people to Islam, as is often assumed in popular perception.
Shaping our views of the religious change are the many recent books that stress the tolerant nature of Islam and its reluctance to impose its beliefs by force. [For example] Karen Armstrong regularly contrasts Muslim tolerance with the bigotry so evident in Christian history.
…Even in the most optimistic view, Armstrong’s reference to Christians possessing “full religious liberty” in Muslim Spain or elsewhere beggars belief.
[However] To make that point does not necessarily mean shifting to the opposite extreme: if Muslim rulers were not all saints, neither were they the spawn of Satan. We need not subscribe to the account of unrelieved Islamic violence proposed by modern authors for whom every war or conquest involving Muslims automatically becomes a manifestation of religiously motivated jihad. (99)
Jenkins goes on to note that even though Muslim rulers were discrimatory in their laws against non-Muslims, there was nothing unusual about this – judged by the standards of the time. And, despite noting regularly and honestly the brutality that brought about the demise of Christianity under Muslim rule, Jenkins is at pains not to exaggerate the legacy of violence by Muslims, even insisting that “Nothing in Muslim scriptures makes the faith of Islam any more or less likely to engage in persecution or forcible conversion than any other world religion.” (31)
Nevertheless, while “Oppression and persecution were not integral to Islamic rule…such conditions could and did develop at particular times, and when they did, they could be devastating.” In fact,
The deeply rooted Christianity of Africa and Asia did not simply fade away through lack of zeal, or theological confusion: it was crushed, in a welter of warfare and persecution. (100)
This destruction of organised Christian faith occurred, according to Jenkins, in two distinct phases. In the Middle Ages, Christians lost their majority status within Muslim-held territories. Some groups suffered a great deal (like the Syriac sects) while others such as Egypt’s Coptic community were more resilient.
The second “wave” of devastation occurred much more recently – in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so that now many of these countries are now so “Christian-free” that we presume this has always been the case.
Jenkins concludes that:
…in both cases [phases], the major mechanism of change was the same. For all the reasons we can suggest for long-term decline, for all the temptation to assimilate, the largest single factor for Christian decline was organized violence, whether in the form of massacre, expulsion or forced migration. (141)
A watershed century
In chapter 4 (“The Great Tribulation”) Jenkins details the first phase of this devastating process – by retracing the steps, begun by initial conquest in the seventh and eighth centuries, but reaching it’s fulcrum in the fourteenth century. A brutal wave of persecution swept across the Middle East. This growing intolerance was fuelled by fear and mistrust, with Christian minorities accused of being seditious and plotting against Muslims. The results were devastating. They culminated in the late fourteenth century with the Ottoman Turk warlord Timur targeting non-Muslims with his cry of “washing the sword of Islam in the blood of the infidels.” “His distinctive custom, his trademark, was to exterminate the population of any city that resisted him, and to erect a giant pyramid built from the skulls of his victims…” Jenkins suggests that “considering the much smaller population of the world at that time, Timur’s depredations probably inflicted greater slaughter, in relative terms, than would either Hitler or Stalin in their day.” (137)
During the Middle Ages, and especially during the fourteenth century, church hierachies were destroyed, priests and monks were killed, enslaved or expelled, and monasteries and cathedrals fell silent. As church institutions fell, so Christian communities shrank, the result of persecution or ethnic and religious cleansing. (23)
To give some idea of the decline, Jenkins uses Asia Minor (modern day Turkey – the home of Iconium, Galatia and Bithynia, and the seven churches of the book of Revelation) to illustrate. In 1050 this area was still overwhelmingly Christian – mainly Orthodox. By 1500 the Christian percentage of the population had shrunk to 10-15%, with just three bishops where there had been 373!
In fact, in Asia, the number of Christians is estimated to have fallen from in excess of 21 million, in 1200AD, to just 3.4million, three hundred years later. So what did this mean for the global Christian movement?
According to Jenkins,
A brutal purge of Christianity, most spectacularly in Asia, left Europe as the geographical heart of the Christian faith, and as the only possible base for later expansion. The destruction was not total, but whole areas were swept clean of Christian communities, and believers elsewhere were reduced to a tiny fraction of the population. (24)
Jenkins contends that:
The disasters of the late Middle Ages tore Christianity from its roots – cultural, geographical and linguistic…[As a result] Christianity did indeed become “European”, but about a millennium later than most people think
He goes on to say that:
…unlike Islam, Christianity has not retained its original foundation, in that its original homeland – the region where it enjoyed its greatest triumphs over its first millennium [Asia Minor/Middle East/Mesopotamia/North Africa etc] – is now overwhelmingly Muslim. To offer a parallel example to understand how radical the uprooting of Christianity was, we would have to imagine a counterfactual world in which Islam was extinguished in Arabia and the Middle East, and survived chiefly in Southeast Asia, using scriptures translated into Malay and Bengali. Christianity is just as severed from its original context. (26)
The final nail in the coffin
Given all they had endured for centuries, it is remarkable that even until the early twentieth century, numbers of Christians still lived and worshipped in the Near/Middle East. Sadly, most of them no longer remain. What happened to them?
In chapter 5, entitled “The Last Christians”, Jenkins charts the second major phase of Christian virtual decimation of Middle Eastern Christianity between the late nineteenth century and the Second World War. This is a disturbing chapter – perhaps more so than any previous ones – because the level of intimidation, persecution and violence against remaining Christian minorites over these years occurred in recent (modern) history, right under our noses, so to speak.
Jenkins estimates the Christian population of the Middle East in 1900 AD at around 4/5 million – around 11% of the total population. Today it is a miniscule fraction of that. Why did this happen?
Mass violence was by no means a new factor in Muslim-Christian relations, but matters deteriorated from the early nineteenth century, as Muslim societies felt themselves under increasing threat from the Christian West. As so often in history, the persecutors saw their actions as fundamentally defensive in nature, and the sense that a majority community was facing grave threats to its very existence drove them to acts of persecution and intolerance against convenient minorities. (156)
The slaughter in (Christian) Armenia during 1915/6 is well documented and reasonably well known. In fact, Adolph Hitler was well aware of it because he noted ominously in 1939, “Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?” Around 1 million Armenians were slaughtered by the Turks, while a further million were displaced.
What is less known is that other Christian communities throughout the Near East also suffered horrendously over the following 10-15 years. Nestorian and Assyro-Chaldean churches were targeted, as was the Christian-majority region of Lebanon. Not all of this should be attributed to deliberate anti-Christian persecution. However, across the Middle East, “Christian communities vanished one after the other, like lights being turned off.” (163)
Reflecting on the legacy
The final third of the book is spent reflecting on the legacy of the decimated Church in the East, and lessons that may be learnt from its demise.
In chapter six, entitled “Ghosts of a Faith”, Jenkins examines some of the remaining traces of Christianity in the Middle East. Even where churches disappear, there continue to be ongoing influences and reminders within the cultural and religious landscape. In fact, Jenkins contends, much in the way of practices and architecture often gets incorporated into the victorious religion.
In chapter seven (“How Faiths Die”) Jenkins considers why Christianity died in these lands and conversely why Islam triumphed. This is a fascinating analysis.
While stressing that all of the great religions of the world have been incredibly resilient globally (rebounding from defeat, disaster and persecution), on a localized basis sometimes they do “die”. In the case of Christianity, “the primary role of the state in the elimination of churches and communities” has been a key factor.
Jenkins notes that, in spite of modern Christianity’s ambivalence toward alliances with states, it is a lot easier to survive and thrive in countries where the state is supportive of Christian faith.
Conversely, lack of political power potentially posed a lethal danger when the state was in the hands of a rival determined to reshape culture to institutionalize its own ways of belief and practice. Powerlessness placed intolerable burdens upon the churches, forcing them to make daily compromises while offering rich rewards for apostasy. (209)
This kind of thinking “sticks in the craw” for many of us because we are used to thinking that our faith “conquers” most effectively when we have an absence of worldly influence and power and is enhanced and purified by opposition. One might immediately think of the vibrant and growing churches in the communist world through the twentieth century or the regular (though mainly localised) outbreaks of persecution in the Roman Empire for the first three hundred years of Christianity’s existence. For such examples, Tertullian’s famous words seem to apply – “The blood of the martyrs is [indeed] the seed of the church.”
However, Jenkins deduces that the key difference is the length of time and intensity that Christians have to endure such persecution. A few decades are very different to a thousand years of mistreatment. Ultimately, what caused the Church to “die” in these Near Eastern lands was the ongoing and cumulative effect of being treated as inferior by the ruling faith. Even though such minority communities could exist for decades and sometimes even centuries by living within the boundaries of the severe limitations placed on them, when major violence and persecution did erupt against them, as it inevitably did, it had a kind of ratchet effect, building on the fear, oppression and past experience of generations.
Following such an event, the minority community would be reduced or scattered still further, and the survivors of the shrinking minority could then expect peace until the next cycle of intolerance began. The ratchet turned another notch, and the minority moved closer to ultimate elimination or exile. (211)
Such persecution was intensified when the established religion perceived its own existence to be threatened. For example,
The worst period for Middle Eastern Christians followed the social and religious revolution introduced by the Mongol regime in the thirteenth century; and the later Japanese state faced a genuine threat from predatory European colonial powers. (210)
To this could be added the perceived (both real and imagined) threat the Middle Eastern states faced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
On the other side of the equation, there were certain elements of Islam apart from political power that, Jenkins contends, aided its longevity and dominance in these lands.
One of these factors was the role of migration, which “…played a much greater role than birthrates in altering the balance between religions, and governments did much to manipulate migration trends.” (212) Jenkins notes, as examples of this, the population transfers in Spain, Sicily, Egypt, Asia Minor and the Arabian peninsula. Sometimes this took the form of deportation, but often it was by immigration – bringing in Muslims to outnumber the existing Christians.
Additionally, Jenkins contends,
Muslim regimes over the centuries succeeded wonderfully in creating societies and cultures that exercised overwhelming pressures toward religious conformity, in establishing the faith of Muhammad as the natural default religion, which permeated the whole of culture. (214)
Jenkins highlights both the positives and negatives of this holism, noting the sense of collective solidarity with “the Brotherhood” and an environment where being religion and culture are completely intertwined.
However, the negatives were the burden placed on “unbelievers”, who are always consigned to being outsiders and second-class citizens, deeply restricted in their activities and the subject of contempt and humiliation. Under such a culture, the pressure to assimilate and convert is immense.
Jenkins also notes the role that language played in Christianity’s demise. Reminiscent of so many lands (including our own) where the invading power naturally begins to conduct public discourse in the rulers’ language, Arabic quickly became dominant and “…the older languages of the subject peoples fell increasingly into disuse”. For the reality is that:
…when members of a faith are unable to express their ideas except in a language that is primarily associated with a rival religious system – can use only the words and intellectual categories of another creed – that minority religion is en route to oblivion. (222)
Finally, states Jenkins, “Worldly success was a potent force in the growth of Islam, and in the shrivelling of Christianity….Self-evidently, Islam represented growth, expansion, and success, in contrast to the tattered shreds of Christianity…The heart-breaking consistency of defeats, generation after generation, carried a deadly message.” (225)
Christianity was seen as a “religion of losers” and the ongoing extension of Islamic rule after the collapse of Acre in 1291 (the last stronghold of the Crusaders), proved decisive. How could God possibly be on the side of Christians and Christian states, when they were losing ground and power?
In the penultimate chapter (“The Mystery of Survival”) Jenkins explores the question of why some of the Christian communities in these lands lasted so long and, in one or two cases, have actually survived – albeit in much smaller and restricted form. He touches on the full range – from the rapid extinction of the North African church (modern day Tunisia and Algeria) right through to the other extreme – the survival of the Coptics in Egypt.
Part of the reason for such variation, Jenkins believes, has to do with geography. Minorities tend to survive better in more geographically remote areas. The longevity of the Armenians, Georgians, Copts and Ethiopians are used as examples here. But such survival, Jenkins speculates, proved much more difficult in the modern era – particularly from the nineteenth century on, as states sought “…to control their entire territory, and had no patience for the tolerance previously granted to dissident regions.” (240)
The search for meaning
“Endings and Beginnings” completes Philip Jenkins’ extensive study. In this chapter he asks:
If in fact the religion is true, if God intends his church to carry a message to the utmost ends of the earth, why would he ever allow that church to die? Is God silent, or non-existent? (248)
These are uncomfortable questions to reflect upon – particularly when it is difficult to see little of God’s providence at work. In fact blind chance, Jenkins suggests, is more easily seen in the political and geographical factors that seem to heavily influence which religions thrive and transform particular peoples and which die. Not that Jenkins is himself at all convinced by such nihilism.
He briefly considers some other possible answers – such as a form of punishment by God for theological or moral failure, but these explanations are dismissed by Jenkins as largely unsatisfactory.
Instead, he ponders the possibility that our view of time can easily lead us to premature judgements, suggesting that,
…perhaps only our limited awareness of time leads us to think that the ruin of a church has happened “forever” when all we mean is that, by our mortal standards, we can see no chance of it being reversed. In fact, religions are like biological organisms, which do not become extinct just because they are driven from a particular environment. Provided they continue to exist elsewhere, they might well return someday to recolonize. And often, in the human context, memories of that historical precedent help shape the new settlement. (254)
He cites the recreation of a Jewish state and the repopulation of Spain with a vibrant Muslim community (through immigration) as recent examples of how “historical memory shapes the return to old habitats.” China, of course, is another example.
It’s an interesting perspective, and one that should not be dismissed out of hand. Still, the question remains, why would God allow his people to suffer such defeat and dispersal? And what is Islam’s role in all of this really mean? For a page or two Jenkins speculates about whether there is a positive role of Islam’s involvement in the work of God that we might be able to recognise. While I appreciate his open and honest ruminations, I can’t help feeling as though he is clutching at straws.
Jenkins concludes by suggesting that maybe in all of our attempts to understand the apparent death of Christianity in these lands, we are asking the wrong question. Taking his cue from more Anabaptist theology, he ponders whether attempting to judge the success or failure of a Christian community by “worldly success” – numbers, political power and influence is to miss the point. Indeed, it could be argued that:
…minority status and persecution are the natural and predictable outcome of attempting to live a Christian life, and it is the communities that coexist comfortably with state power that have departed from the norm. What matters is not the size or numbers claimed by churches, but rather the quality of witness demonstrated by Christians in their particular circumstances. (260)
And besides, while catastrophe befell the churches in the Middle East during the early twentieth century, at the same time the church in black Africa was beginning its epochal growth. New life was emerging in one place while death was occurring in another.
This is more plausible to me, even if it still is far from a comprehensive answer to the questions raised. But I guess that is the point: mystery abounds. Ultimately, we don’t really understand. Instead we can only trust that God does and that in spite of all the apparent setbacks and reversals of the global Christian movement, God is at work in bringing about his reign, through all the ebbs and flows of visible Christian witness.
In God we must ultimately trust.
Interesting points to ponder
- “The first translation of a major section of the New Testament into any language was made in Asia” – around by 170AD by Tatian, into Syriac.
- “For a thousand years, Syriac Christians produced scholars and thinkers who could be set beside the best of their Greek or Latin contemporaries, and who shaped the emerging world of Islamic science and philosophy.” (78)
- Bahrain, Yemen and Oman all had vibrant Christian communities prior to the expansion of Islam.
- “The Mongol invasions [of the thirteenth century] posed what was unquestionably the greatest threat ever to the existence of Islam [not the Crusades, which look like “fleabites” in comparison]…When modern-day Iraqis denounce American occupiers as the New Mongols, they are invoking memories of the direst moment of their history.” (121)
- Saddam Hussein’s home city – Tikrit – was for centuries a key and important centre of Christianity and monasticism, before it became a stronghold of Sunni Muslims.
- Basra, Iraq was the centre of a bishopric as early as 225AD and became the seat of a metropolitan bishop in the fifth century. Today, of course, it is more famous as being a centre for militant Islamists.
- As recently as 1970, 5-6% of Iraq’s population were Christians. Now it is less than 1%. Many have left the country as a result of the Iraqi-Iran war, the Gulf War and the subsequent economic sanctions. Muslim militancy, unleashed by the second invasion in 2003 and the resentment it created, has made Christians primary targets for intimidation, kidnapping and murder, making it even more difficult to remain in the country.
- The word “genocide” was first coined by Polish Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, in 1943 to argue for a new category of crimes of barbarity – acts of extermination directed against an ethnic, religious or social collective. In doing so, he used the cases of the Assyrian and Armenian Christians to explain what he meant.
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