Book Review: The Lost History of Christianity

I find books fall into three (increasingly rare) categories: those that I read at a normal rate, those that I read quickly because they're so good, and those that I force myself to read slowly because they're so incredibly good and full of stuff that changes the way I see other things. Guess which one this is? Yep, it's the last. If you have any interest in the lessons of history for the church, you need to read this book. It's that simple.

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This book is a history of Eastern Christianity, branches of which include the Nestorian, Jacobite, Coptic, Assyrian, and Chinese churches roughly in the time period 200-1500AD. You may have never heard of some of these churches, because (with the exception of Coptic) they have literally gone extinct. The thing is, during the 500-1200AD period, there were probably more Christians in these churches than there were in Europe. They were minority presences in Persian, Chinese, African and later Islamic empires, but they were great in number, and now they are gone. All that remains are the ruins of old cathedrals and hints of great libraries lost. In this sense as I was reading this book, with its bizarre names and tragic endings, I realized that I was reading a real-life Silmarillion (J.R.R. Tolkien's compendium of Middle-Earth history). (For some people that may be an insult but for me it's a high compliment.)

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The thing is, where did all these Christians go? It's a complex and violent tale of waves of persecution, and some bad choices made by the churches involved. But there is a legacy that remains: for instance, everyone talks about how the Arabs saved much of Aristotle and other Greek thinkers for the Renaissance to re-discover, but no one in my memory has mentioned that it was Christians in Syria who saved Aristotle for the Arabs!

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The biggest mistake that the church made that I can easily and naively identify is that they allied themselves with the Mongols. Mongols were not themselves Christians but often married Christian women, who had some influence and definitely caused the Muslims who were conquered by the Mongols to identify them with Christianity. The Mongols utterly destroyed much of the Far East (in fact, they swept as far West as Vienna). Baghdad in particular was so decimated that many historians say the current defensive, reactionary attitude among many Muslims can be traced to their painful memory of that part of history. Christians enjoyed a brief flourishing under Mongol rule as the favored minority, true. But then two things happened: 1.) Egyptian Muslims actually turned back the Mongols and 2.) All the Mongols returned to Mongolia when their leader died to decide who would be the next leader ... and they never came back, leaving a swath of scorched earth. The Muslims came back to rule and their relationship with the Christians was never the same again. Note that it wasn't the Eastern Christians who conquered all of Asia, but it was those Christian communities who remained when the Mongols left. Some astonishing massacres happened sporadically as a result, so that over the next 500 years or so even the memory of Christianity was lost. In retrospect Mongols weren't the best friends to have -- though it must have made a lot of military sense at the time.

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Some of these massacres are surprisingly recent: just about 100 years ago, perhaps 1.5 million Christians were systematically killed in Armenia, aided in part by the new railroads in the area that carried soliders from place to place, "cleansing" it of Christians. In fact, it was these atrocities that made those who described them grope for a new word to describe the vast nature of the murder going on. The word they came up for it? Genocide. Genocide has Christian roots, with Christians being the victims.

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I am still assimilating the amazing history of this book. For the most part it's written at a fast clip, and the extra details I wished for occasionally may not even exist, so can't complain about that. The final three chapters are interpretive and vary in quality: Chapter 7 in my opinion is straightforward and not really nuanced at all, but Chapters 8 and 9 do a great job of pulling it all together and making it relevant. Pointing out that entire continents have been left out of history is a big job, and as usual Jenkins pulls it off very well. Count me impressed -- and changed.

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If you're debating getting this book at all by this point, let me make it easy for you: do it. Read this book and see what it changes for how you view history. (And let me know what you think!)