Product Description

This book tells a surprising story. Many think of Christianity as a Western faith, which grew out of its origins in the Middle East towards Rome and into Europe, paving the way for the Enlightenment, science and modernity. However, Philip Jenkins reveals, the largest and most influential churches of Christianity's youth lay to the east of Rome, covered the world from China to North Africa, encountered a full spectrum of acceptance to persecution under Islamic rule and only expired after a thousand-year reign after Constantine. This is the story of these churches of the East and how they became extinct - but not before becoming the dominant expression of Christianity for its first 1,000 years and helping to shape both the Asia and the Christianity we know today.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #47903 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-20
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

About the Author
Philip Jenkins is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Humanities at Pennsylvania State University. He was educated at Cambridge and has written 20 books and over a hundred articles and reviews. He has won several book prizes in Christian and secular arenas alike.

Customer Reviews

Politically correct ranting
I'm very interested in Syriac Christianity and the various Arabic Christian groups and literature that arise from it. I therefore hoped that this would discuss the history of both, down to our own time. I was also under the impression that this was a book written by a Christian, not least because Lion Publishing was founded to make Christian books available. Boy, was I wrong on all counts!

The first couple of pages discuss terminology. Should we refer to "Church of the East" or "Nestorian"? Both have their merits. Rather diffusely, he decides to stick with the latter. I agree; but his treatment of the pro's and con's was rather vague.

After this, I was somewhat disconcerted to find a dreary PC rant occupying the opening pages. And it went on and on. After 20 pages of inverted racism -- Charlemagne bad, orientals good -- I began to grow somewhat impatient. I have no interest in learning how much a salaried and tenured state appointee at some very comfortable US university hates those to whom he owes everything. What I want to hear about, and paid good money for, is the history of Coptic, Syriac and Arabic Christianity.

The book seems to be stuffed with PC opinionising, and distinctly light on any kind of systematic and structured history. (If you are PC, it may not annoy you as much as it did me!) It was telling that he quoted with evident approval some rather hypocritical remarks by the nauseating high priestess of the Episcopal Church of the USA -- currently engaged in sueing her own congregations out of the buildings they paid for in order to promote unnatural vice --, when she attacked the Pope for pointing out the threat of Islam. Unless you are a raving lefty, drooling with hate at anything western, you'll find it contemptible. He even manages to suggest that anyone who is concerned about the Islamic threat in our own day is "far right", i.e. a Nazi. Nice! Well, let us show him the tolerance that he won't show to us, and accept that his politics are his business; but I paid for a book on the history of eastern Christianity, and I didn't get one.

So what *is* this book? I felt that this book is really an essay, in which the author decorates his political and religious opinions on the history of Christian (and those dreadful Europeans he hates so much) with allusions to events in the history of the eastern churches. If that is your bag, buy it. But don't expect to learn all that much about eastern Christianity in the process.

I also began to feel, after a while, that his hate was much stronger than his likings. Indeed I don't think that the author actually cares much about the eastern Christians.

One example of this is his discussion of the Nestorian Patriarch, Timothy I. Now Timothy was a truly interesting figure, a scholarly and learned man, interested in preserving Greek knowledge, in evangelising the east, and so on. He even managed to offer an apology for Christianity at the court of the then Caliph; a very risky undertaking before a capricious oriental despot. Jenkins, characteristically, turns the incidental positive remarks about Islam -- made in the context of risk of death if he said a negative word about Islam, in the face of a direct question by the caliph -- into some kind of argument that Timothy was a syncretist!

But surely what we would like to see is a chapter on the man, filled with specifics, footnoted to the primary literature. This is not there. He gets a favourable treatment, but mainly so that Jenkins can sneer at the court of Charlemagne, then in the process of building the basis of all modern civilisation. But Timothy doesn't seem really important to Jenkins and I didn't feel that the author was really all that interested in him. He's just a straw figure, with which to beat the author's political foes by means of a disparaging comparison. His utility over, he disappears from the text, and some other topic is introduced. When the time comes to bring him back, lo! up he pops again. I found this very annoying indeed. Enough with the theorising; give me Timothy, I wanted to cry!

In general, I felt that the book was maddeningly bad, as a guide to the subject which it professes to treat. The author has plainly read a lot of secondary sources. But he felt able to just dart around the subject.

The footnoting was one of the better bits; interesting allusions were generally footnoted. But I also felt that the factual accuracy of some of the material was suspect here and there. Quotations are given from time to time; but I was not clear whether the author actually knows Syriac or Arabic.

Any introductory text on Syriac literature, such as the old introduction by William Wright, or Sebastian Brock's newer one, is better than this. Sadly no decent introduction to Arabic Christianity and its literature exists in English. I had hoped that this might be one; it was not. Am I going to have to write one, to get such a book? I really hope not.

Avoid.

An ancient branch of Christianity, fascinatingly brought to life
A fascinating insight into a neglected corner of church history, this is the story of the spread, flourishing and long slow decline of so-called Nestorian and Jacobite Christianity in Syria, Mesopotamia and points east along the Silk Road into what are now Afghanistan, China, and Japan. (Technically known as the Assyrian Church of the East and the Syrian Orthodox Church, the Nestorian and Jacobite branches of the faith grew out of the split from so-called `orthodox' Christianity amidst the politicking of the 5th-century Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon.)

This is a tale that Jenkins tells well, particularly when it comes to the tremendous flowering of the faith from the fifth and sixth centuries onwards. He highlights the vital role centres of learning like Nisibis had, both in preserving the teaching of thinkers of the ancient world such as Aristotle, and in acting as a centre of insightful theological speculation to rival Rome and Constantinople. Although he ventures once again into territory he's covered before in examining the not-always harmonious relationships between Christianity and often intolerant Islam (especially from the 13th century onwards), Jenkins' account is nevertheless nuanced enough to make it clear that Christians were sometimes tolerated (albeit as second-class citizens), and to address openly how external factors - especially disastrous political alliances with the Mongols, periods of economic hardship and the provocations of other branches of Christianity - played their part in the relatively rapid demise of the Church of the East.

Jenkins brings the account up to date with an analysis of how the Church of the East is gradually but inexorably on the wane in its ancient heartlands of eastern Turkey and Iraq today. There's some thought-provoking stuff, too, on how faiths are not divinely protected from decline, and on what is needed to keep them alive - though Jenkins is pessimistic about the survival of these two particular branches for much longer. By turns absorbing and sad, and revealing a frustrating boneheadedness about people of faith that sometimes makes them their own worst enemies, this book ought to be required reading for those in the West thoughtful about the seemingly unstoppable downward trajectory of mainstream Christianity among us, and wondering what to do about it.