The Lost History of Christianity

I finished reading Philip Jenkins' excellent recent book The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Gold Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia - and How It Died last week, and was very favorably impressed by it. Jenkins, who teaches at Penn State and has written other works on the subject on religious history and global Christianity, presents a facet of Christian history that too often gets overlooked by a view of Christianity that sees it primarily as an European/North American/Western religion long since divorced from its Semitic roots.

These roots remained strong for far longer than the story of the Western Church would lead one to believe, and Jenkins shows how the history of Eastern Christianity (such as the Coptic Church, Nestorians, or Jacobites) provides a balance to many assumptions about the nature of Christian history. The growth of the Church to the East, its flourishing, its existence well past the emergence of Islam all paint a different view of Christianity, which is often assumed to be a majority faith closely allied with governments based on the course it took in the West. Jenkins' work shows that the course of Western Christianity is only one possible route, and indeed, is only one way in which it developed historically. He provides a balanced analysis of religious persecution, noting the extensive periods of peaceful toleration and coexistence under Islamic rule while also noting that periods of intense persecution and violence that did take place as well.

Jenkins' also discusses why faiths die in various regions, and what lessons this reality might hold for the faithful in those regions and followers of the faith observing it from afar. The idea that Christianity could be driven out of areas of the world that it had inhabited and flourished in for centuries is something that is deeply unsettling for believers, and The Lost History of Christianity forced me to grapple with this uncomfortable truth. However, this book also has much that is hopeful for a Christian, showing that Christianity can be practiced anywhere in the world without forcing Western culture as a part of it. Indeed, the ways in which the Eastern churches presented Christianity in ways that connected and fit with the cultures it encountered is an important lesson for 21st century Christianity, which once again is making major inroads in places like China and is growing at a torrid place in many parts of Africa. The re-Christianization of these lands that once before had important Christian centers is a reminder that the end of Christianity in a place is not the final word on the matter, as history has shown time and again.

Indeed, an understanding of this is key to beginning to grapple with the fact that Christianity died out (actually was killed, as Jenkins' shows. It was violence and persecution that brought an end to these churches). If we as Christians seriously believe that God's sense of time is different than hours and that there is any truth to be found in the simile "with the Lord a thousand years is as a day" then we must recognize that in view of God's time what we may see as a irreversible setback may be nothing more than a small shift. This doesn't mean that this is the end of all grappling with why Christianity may die or be killed in certain areas, and I think we should take seriously the need to develop what Jenkins' calls a "theology of extinction."

The history of Christianity in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia is a huge part of Christian history that gets overlooked and is a powerful antidote to a Eurocentric view of Christianity that leads to all sort of assumptions about Christianity that are often more to do with Western culture than anything inherent to Christianity. To give just one example, Jenkins' points out how knowledge of the history of the Church in the East can offer a valuable contribution to debates in Biblical studies:

The Syriac Bible was a conservative text, to a degree that demands our attention. In recent years, accounts of the early church claim that scriptures and gospels were very numerous, until the mainstream Christian church suppressed most of them in the fourth century. This alleged purge followed the Christian conversion of the Emperor Constantine, at a time when the church supposedly wanted to ally with the empire in the interests of promoting order, orthodoxy, and ecclesiastical authority. According to modern legend, the suppressed works included many heterodox accounts of Jesus, which were suspect because of their mystical or even feminist leanings.

The problem with all this is that the Eastern churches had a long familiarity iwth the rival scriptures, but rejected them because they knew they were late and tendentious. Even as early as the second century, the Diatessaron assumes four, and only four, authentic Gospels. Throughout the Middle Ages, neither Nestorians or Jacobites were under an coercion from the Roman/Byzantine Empire or church, and had they wished, they could have included in the canon any alternative Gospels or scriptures they wanted to. But instead of adding to the canon, they chose to prune. The Syriac Bible omits several books that are included in the West (2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and the book of Revelation). Scholars like Isho'dad wanted to carry the purge further, and did not feel that any of the Catholic Epistles could seriously claim apostolic authorship. The only extraneous text that a few authorities wished to include was the Diatessaron itself. The deep conservatism of these churches, so far removed from papal or imperial control, makes nonsense of claims that the church bureaucracy allied with empire to suppress unpleasant truths about Christian origins (87-88).

This is just one way in which knowledge of the broader history of Christianity has important ramifications for how we understand the faith today, and I appreciative of people like Jenkins' interested in telling this story in a way that is both academically rigorous and popularly accessible, sharing with a wider readership what has been circulating in scholarly circles for a long time. I am grateful for the way this book has helped me to appreciate the fuller history of the church and is continuing to make me grapple with why the faith has spread and contracted in different ways and different places throughout history.