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The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died
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Item Description...
The Untold Story of the Church's First Thousand Years In this groundbreaking book, renowned religion scholar Philip Jenkins offers a lost history, revealing that for centuries Christianity's center existed to the east of the Roman Empire. |
Item Specifications...
Pages 315
Dimensions: Length: 0.75" Width: 5.5" Height: 8.5"
Weight: 0.55 lbs.
Binding Softcover
Publisher HarperOne
ISBN 0061472816
EAN 9780061472817
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Availability 61 units.
Availability accurate as of May 30, 2012 04:36.
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Reviews - What do our customers think?
 | The Fall Of The Early Christian Heartland Oct 15, 2009 |
Throughout the Near East and Africa - the heartland of early Christianity - the rise of Islam has dictated the fall of Christianity. Unlike most books, Philip Jenkins' study takes the political history of Islamic conquest as a given, and focuses instead on the actual process by which Islam replaced Christianity in the conquered territories. There is much food for thought here. For example, the Christian decline was a long, slow fall. Initially a vibrant presence under their new Muslim overlords, the decline accelerated as more "hard core" Islamic regimes developed in the Middle Ages, and completed only with the rise of true nation-states in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Many other factors are considered in the book: persecution, discrimination, conversion, language replacement (e.g. Coptic and Greek by Arabic), geography (when pressured, Christians literally "took to the hills"), population transfer, plague, war, crop failures, and other natural and man-made disasters of all kinds (earthquakes, to add an example of my own, like the ones that decimated ancient Petra). The point is that Islamic communities in the affected areas were assisted in "disaster recovery" by their co-religionist rulers, while Christian communities were just allowed to die out.
As mentioned earlier, the book is light on political history. It is also avoids doctrinal discussions, so for example if you want to know what the Nestorians believed, there is only a sentence or two about that in the book. There are promising, but abbreviated, discussions of early Christian influence on Islam that included the transfer of ancient Greek learning, innumerable religious influences, and even the basic forms of religious architecture. I would have liked more information on all of this, and the book's exposition is spotty and repetitious in places. However, the author's abundance of ideas and examples, many of which will be unfamiliar yet interesting and useful to the reader, is more than enough reason to recommend it.
| | | | Some history you probably don't know Sep 26, 2009 |
"The Lost History of Christianity: A Thousand Year Golden Age" covers a period of history largely forgotten -- namely the rise and fall of Christianity outside of Europe and the Americas.
The author, Phillip Jenkins, reminds us that for hundreds of years, after Christ, Christianity spread East as well as West and that the Chrsitain faith in the East developed different customs, and rituals than in the West.
For a signficant period, after Islam spread through the region, the Eastern faith and Islam coexisted. However, over time, sometimes violently, but more often, in measured ways, Islam displaced Chrsitianity. With objectivity and balance, Jenkins provides us the details of that displacement.
While Jenkins clearly mourns the loss of Christian in the East, he has no "agenda" except to tell the story accuartely. He imparts the reader with knowledge and information, that few, except scholars, would already know. However, only ocassionally, is he too scholarly for the general reader.
Besides the ocassional dip into scholarly discourse, my only other significant complaint is the subtitle. Much of the book does describe Christainity in the East for the first thousand years after Chist, but Jenkins provides material, including, some modern references, beyond that timeperiod. Properly speaking, the subttitle accuartely describes only about two-thirds of the text.
Still, these flaws aside, whether you are an armchair historian or a Christian looking for greater understanding of the history of your faith, or both, The Lost History is a worthy and important read.
| | |  | A Very Informative Read Sep 7, 2009 |
I had been aware of the Nestorian Church and other churches outside of Europe in the Medieval Period, but Philip Jenkin's book was insightful as well as a good read. The cultural importance and widespread nature of Chrsitianity outside of Europe prior to the tragedies of the 1200s-1400s went far beyond what I had assumed. Jenkins skillfully weaves a story of Nestorians, Jacobites, and other Christians in Africa, China, India, and especially the Middle East (while Egypt is technically in Africa and Armenia is often not culturally associated with the region, I counting them with the Middle East here). "The Lost History of Christianity" briefly tells the story of the expansion of Christianity into Sassanian Persia before focusing more on the Islamic Period. Jenkins is not a fear-mongering anti-Muslim (if anything many Christians including myself would be a little uncomfortable at best with some of his philisophical opinions)and presents the story with both more positive sides of caliphal rule (compared to Byzantines) and the negatives. The rise of Islamic intolerance across vast swathes of the Middle East after the 1200s helps explain the fall of Middle Eastern Christian populations which until then still made up considerable proportions of the population in many areas. Jenkins also carries the story into the modern world with the Armenian/Assyrian/Greek/ genocide and more recent persecution. Also of interest is discussion regarding the Christians of T'ang Dynasty China though the author says relatively little about the fall of Japanese Christianity except a few generally broad details. Jenkins looks at survival strategies and ultimate reasons why churches outside of Europe often declined in the Middle Ages. The author also speculates on why God might allow His churches to experience drastic defeats on times (some of this is interesting while other aspects of his thought I would very much disagree with).
Overall while I don't share all the author's thoughts, I must give Jenkins credit for a very interesting, informative, and eye-opening work of history. It is a generally well-written and structured work as well. I heartilly recommend it though with a disclaimer that I don't share some of the author's possible opinions regarding the cosmic relationships of various faiths. | | | | A history of Christianity very little known in the west Sep 5, 2009 |
Much of the true history of Christianity was lost to those in the west. The typical Christian history book usually only discusses the growth of the faith in the west.
But what happened in the east? We can find small groups which testify to the their heritage, such as the Ethiopian and Indian churches. Jenkins asks the obvious, based upon the old legend: Did an apostle visit India soon after the crucifixion? The evidence is fragmentary, but fascinating.
Indian Christianity is only one of the many Christian churches Jenkins investigates. Jenkins points our that "Nestorian missionaries influenced the religious practices of the Buddhist religion then developing in Tibet" (p 92). In fact, Nestorian Christianity was once a vast church, one that rivaled in numbers the church of the west. It spread across the Middle East, along the Silk Road, right into China.
How could it vanish almost as if it had never existed?
All of north Africa was also once Christian, an area solidly Muslim today. One Catholic pope came from the north African church. "In its day, the African church had been one of the wonders of the Christian world...Africa was the home of such great early leaders as Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine. By the late fifth century North Africa had five or six hundreds bishoprics, while monasteries were a familiar part of the local social landscape" (p 228). This church, too, would vanish, almost as though it had never existed.
A fascinating history, one with many valuable nuggets of information.
'Martyr in Tibet' and 'Christians in China AD 600 to 2000' would also be of interest to anyone researching this area. Also, for some time I have been searching for a book on the influence of Christianity on Buddhist, Indian, and other eastern religions. If anyone knows of such a book, please leave me the information in the Comments section. Thanks! | | |  | 1/3 interesting history, 2/3 boring plotical rantiness Aug 31, 2009 |
The author ignores the survival of the native Christian traditions of Ethiopia (63% Christian!) and Kerala, India (a healthy remnant community). Of course, to acknowledge them would further weaken his political blathering that mostly reduces to "Fear Islam! Yes, they were ok to live under sometimes, but then they WIPED CHRISTIANITY OFF THE MAP!" I mean, yes, that's mostly what happened in the near-and-middle east, in the dark-and-middle ages, but the book was 1/3 history and 2/3 political rantiness. Do not want.
To read instead:
A History of Christianity in Asia: Beginnings to 1500
The Church of the East: An Illustrated History of Assyrian Christianity | | | Write your own review about The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died
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