The Vanished pre-European Christendom

on February 4, 2025

Christians today are acutely aware of the secularization of the West and the rise of Christianity in the Global South. But many are not aware of a similar geographic and demographic shift which occurred at the close of the Middle Ages, resulting in the Euro-centric Christianity that we have known since then, and which now may be changing once again.

Philip Jenkins, professor of history at Baylor University, is the author of numerous books on church and global history and has a keen eye for the factors at play in global religious changes. His The Next Christendom (2002, updated 2011) and New Faces of Christianity (2008) analyze the nature and prospects for Christianity in the Global South (Africa, Asia, and Latin America). But it is worth looking retrospectively at 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 (2008), which reviews the flourishing of the oriental Orthodox churches in the first Christian millennium, and on into the High Middle Ages, and their devastation at the close of the Middle Ages, and continuing today.

The Golden Age of Christianity in the Asia and Northeast Africa

The first point made by Jenkins, reiterated over the course of his narrative, is that until the late Middle Ages Christianity was not particularly European. It extended in similar size and in greater scope toward the east, with metropolitans as far away as China, and numerous bishops, archbishops, and monasteries. It also extended substantially to the south, with the Christianization of Nubia and Ethiopia. The Christian church did not quickly become European and then develop over the course of the patristic and medieval periods to later become a world religion. (Although undoubtedly many take this to be the significance of the apostle Paul’s call to Macedonia). Rather it developed in Europe, Asia, and northeast Africa, extending – at least by the sixth century A.D., and possibly much earlier – from the Atlantic (Britain and Gaul) to the Pacific (China).

The Oriental Orthodox churches in the east and the south included the Jacobite (Syrian Orthodox), Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo, and Assyrian Orthodox (Church of the East) churches. These churches are Nicene but non-Chalcedonian in their christology. Jenkins focuses most of all on the Church of the East (historically called Nestorian) which extended east from Syria and Mesopotamia into China and India. He deals substantially with the other Oriental Orthodox churches as well. To show their strength and sophistication, he notes the many metropolitans they had (especially the Church of the East, which had 28 metropolitans from Syria to India and China), and many bishops, monks, and monasteries. These Oriental Orthodox churches also had rich liturgies, and they functioned in the languages of the peoples of Asia and Africa (“Syriac, Persian, Turkish, Sogdian, and Chinese” being specifically mentioned).

Jenkins noted that these churches have the greatest direct connection with the apostolic church. A major point is that Christianity has been torn away from its original homeland the Near East. He believes that efforts in the modern (i.e., post-medieval) period to recover primitive Christianity (especially notable in nineteenth century American Evangelicalism, it might be added) are impossible projects.

Jenkins stresses the vigor of the Oriental Orthodox churches in the early and high Middle Ages. Egypt, Syria, and in significant degree Mesopotamia were Christian at the beginning of the seventh century A.D. and did not suddenly become Muslim in mass conversions after the Arab conquests. Egypt, for instance, seems to have been majority Christian until at least the mid-ninth century, and remained about half Christian until the great persecution of the fourteenth century. Extensive missionary activity continued even centuries after the Arab conquest.

He points in particular to the now vanished city of Merv in what is now southern Turkmenistan. In its “Christian intellectual and spiritual life from the sixth century through the thirteenth … Merv could compete in vigor with any European center ,,, Merv’s scholars had access to Syriac versions of Aristotle at a time when these texts were quite forgotten in Europe.” In the latter part of Merv’s centuries of flourishing, in the mid-twelfth century, it was one of the largest cities in the world, with a population of about 200,000. He points as well to Timothy, Patriarch of Seleucia in Mesopotamia in the late eighth and early ninth century. Timothy was “arguably the most significant Christian spiritual leader of his day, much more influential than the Western pope, in Rome, and on par with the Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople. Perhaps a quarter of the world’s Christians looked to Timothy as both spiritual and political leader.”

As was the case in the Roman Empire, so in the Persian, Christianity was initially viewed with suspicion and fear and was persecuted, with significant cases of martyrdom. But as with Rome, it was eventually accepted, and Christian expansion occurred “benefitting from the empire’s peace and stability.” Expansion occurred using protected trade routes, and churches, schools and monasteries were established.

The farthest verifiable reach of the Church of the East appears to be China. Christianity entered twice before the modern era, only to be eliminated. The first occasion seems to have begun at least by the sixth century with the entrance of monks, followed by an official mission in the early seventh century (635 A.D.). The Chinese called Christianity “the luminous teaching,” and there were churches and monasteries established. There was a metropolitan in the ninth century, which would mean subordinate bishops. But the church was suppressed in the mid-ninth century by a Taoist emperor. Christianity returned in the thirteenth century after the conquest of China by the Mongols, only to be suppressed again.

In India the church claims descent from the apostle Thomas and certainly existed in southern India from the second century. “Through the Middle Ages, churches operated on India’s Malabar Coast, in modern Kerala … they used a Syriac liturgy and looked to the Patriarch of Babylon as their spiritual head. Major churches existed in Mylapore (near Chennai), the alleged site of Thomas’s martyrdom.”

The Decimation of the Eastern Churches

Primarily these churches were decimated (and in some cases, such as in Central Asia and North Africa, annihilated) by the rise of Islam. (In China, of course, hostile dynasties destroyed the churches). However, Jenkins finds that in the early Islamic centuries, there was relative toleration. Indeed it was not clear that Islam was a separate religion, rather than a Christian heresy. The non-Chalcedonian Christians of Egypt and Syria no longer had to live under the Byzantine Chalcedonian Orthodox rule. There were of course advantages in terms of rights and privileges to be gained by adopting Islam, which was the religion of the state, but many Christians kept their faith, even rising to important positions in government and business.

What changed was indeed the Crusades of the late eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but much more than that, the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with which Christians were initially aligned. The horrific sack of Baghdad in 1258 may have killed 800,000 residents, Jenkins reports. For a time in the second half of the thirteenth century, Christians were no longer an inferior social group with “dhimmi” status in that part of the Middle East (including Mesopotamia) which was ruled by the Mongols. In the early Mongol period it was Christians and Buddhists who were favored by the state over Islam.

Toward the close of the thirteenth century, however, the Mongol rulers trended toward Islam. With this development, and the fall of the last Crusader state in 1291, Christians in the Middle East were subject to intense persecution, with churches closed, monasteries destroyed, Christians massacred, and severe dhimmi status imposed. Jenkins notes that “starting in the 1290s, Muslim jurists produced ever harsher interpretations of the laws governing minorities.” He cites one such scholar, Ibn Taymiyyah, as particularly important (and admired by Osama bin Laden). The work of these jurists, Jenkins said, forms the basis of much of the modern Islamic fundamentalist movements, and in particular Wahhabism, dominant in Saudi Arabia and Qatar.  

The Collapse of the Ancient Churches of Asia and Africa

Important in Jenkins book is the thesis that the European trajectory that Christianity has followed, with periods of crisis and persecution followed by renewed vigor, creativity, and expansion, is not the whole story of Christianity. Rejection of Chalcedonian orthodoxy may be part of the reason church history in the West has devoted less attention to the Oriental Orthodox churches. But in a sense, they can be thought of as a fourth branch of Christianity. The trajectory of these ancient churches of the Near East, Central Asia, and North Africa ends (or in some cases nearly ends) in church death. The need to make sense of that and even arrive at a “theology of church death” is important to Jenkins. Current prospects a church might have do not necessarily indicate the future. They may look very good, yet catastrophe can strike in the future, perhaps the near future. Similarly, a small religious group, seemingly with few prospects for expansion may become dominant in the future, as happened with both Christianity and Islam.  

By way of explanation for these catastrophes, the Oriental Orthodox churches never had the support of the state, unlike the Catholic and Orthodox churches of Europe, which were state religions. The Church of the East, Jenkins pointed out, functioned in Persia, Central Asia, China, and India in a pluralistic environment, competing not only with Islam, but with Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Taoism, and other native beliefs and practices. Thus it was more difficult for these churches to survive hostile changes of government. With the great persecutions of Christians that characterized the fourteenth century, Asian and northeast African Christianity lost its vigor, becoming a faith – in several different forms – of ethnic minorities, and its identity closely tied to those minorities.

The post-medieval period – what is called the modern era in the broad sweep of history – saw first the Ottoman Turkish Empire dominate the Middle East and its Christians in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries, followed by a period of Turkish decline in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the end of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. But this period of decline only led to further reduction of the Christian minorities, as they sought protection from Christian European powers – Great Britain, France, and Russia, the last of which presented itself as a defender of the Orthodox Christians of the Middle East. This in turn led to Turkish repression and massacres, with the greatest occurring early in World War I (1915-1916). Those killed included not only Armenians but also Syrian Jacobites and Assyrians. It is estimated, Jenkins notes, that 1.5 million Christians died at this time.

Jenkins observes that this decline of Middle Eastern Christians has not abated in the years since World War I. The war to establish republican Turkey eliminated most Greeks and Armenians from Asia Minor, while Constantinople, which had 400,000 Christians in 1920, has only a few thousand today. Christians amounted to 5 to 6 percent of Iraq’s population in 1970, with many having risen into business and the professions. Today, after wars with Iran and the United States (and since the time of Jenkins writing, ISIS’ war to establish a caliphate) they are less than 1 percent.

Jenkins does not expect Christianity to be utterly extinguished in the Middle East. There will be, he said, at least “a few families, a few old believers” who will “linger on,” while millions of Oriental Orthodox Christians continue to practice their faith in lands of exile. He also notes the numerous “crypto-Christians,” who survive underground, in many cases clinging to parts of their old faith, while appearing to profess the new (just as there are “crypto” followers of other religions that have been suppressed).

Reasons for Survival

Those Christian groups which have survived as minorities for centuries under hostile rule did so for several reasons. In Egypt, “Christianity was firmly rooted among ordinary Egyptians, too deeply to be affected” to a fatal degree “by most disasters that might befall.” This is in contrast to North Africa, where it is speculated that the rich Christian culture which was held by the Latins who lived there did not affect the native peoples. Also, Jenkins observes, remote mountainous locations in Syria and Lebanon (and in the past, Iraq) retained significant Christian populations. Proximity to a border (where one could flee) and a sympathetic local lord (though temporary) also aided in survival. But modern transportation and communication has reduced the ability of minorities to survive hostile governments or non-state actors in these marginal areas.

Understanding the Destruction of Churches from a Christian Viewpoint

Jenkins struggles to find meaning in the largely unsuccessful struggle to survive of ancient and medieval Christianity in the Near East, North Africa, Central Asia, China (and in early modern times, Japan). He does note that times of crisis and decline for the faith in one part of the world may be times of advance in another. When Christianity was submerged in the Near East by the Ottoman Empire, Christian civilization was flowering in Europe and expanding to cover the Western Hemisphere and then reach out to Africa and south and east Asia. The collapse of Christian civilization in Europe under the impact of secularism has happened and is happening at a time of Christian expansion in sub-Saharan Africa. Communist domination in China has been the occasion for enormous Christian expansion there.

And yet as Jenkins notes, there is no doubt that the Oriental Orthodox churches did not suffer catastrophes for lack of piety or faithfulness. Martrydom and miracles (both ancient and contemporary) sustained the faith and expansion of the ancient and medieval church. Numerous priests, monks, nuns, and scholars sought union with the divine through solitary contemplation, pious scholarship and reflection, good works, and faithfulness under great pressure. He observes that innumerable prayers for deliverance surely must have gone up during the many wars and persecutions. But marginalization and extinction commonly followed.

Jenkins seems to settle on God’s inscrutable purposes in history to account for the demise of the ancient Christian churches in Africa and Asia (including the early modern suppression of the Catholic missions in China and Japan). He quotes the nineteenth century German historian Leopold von Ranke’s comment that “all ages are equidistant from eternity, and just as immediately accessible to God’s presence.” Those of a Reformed background emphasize that “whatsoever comes to pass” has its place in God’s design, while Jenkins observes that the Anabaptist tradition can easily hold that “minority status and persecution are the natural and predictable outcome of attempting to live the Christian life.” More importantly, the very words of Jesus assure us that the meek will inherit the earth, and to expect persecution (Matt. 5:1-12). It is finally to God’s word that we must be faithful and in which we must rest.

  1. Comment by Tim Ware on February 4, 2025 at 11:58 pm

    Another way of looking at it is that which Jesus called “the ruler of this world” only allows that which furthers his purposes to prosper.

  2. Comment by Wilson R. on February 5, 2025 at 12:44 pm

    This is a fascinating and very useful history. Thank you for posting it.

  3. Comment by Sargon on February 6, 2025 at 3:16 pm

    As an Assyrian American this is a wonderful and enlightening article. Thank you for shedding light. It is estimated that there are only 3,000,000 Assyrians remaining, a fraction of the earths population. We do well in the west and have been immigrating since the late 1800s. My parents immigrated as refugees after escaping to Greece where Assyrians were given instant Asylum no questions asked. From there my parents waited for papers to come to the USA for over 5 years. I luckily speak Assyrian Aramaic although less and less of us American Assyrians do, I hope that will change.

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