Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
History of the Early Christian Church in the Middle & Far East, November 30, 2008
In a very scholarly book, Jenkins brings to light one of the oft forgotten part of Christian history, and it implications for today. The church started in the Middle East, and in the beginning, quickly spread to parts south and east, reaching Africa, India and China well before it was established in Europe. Many of those churches lasted for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and had a distinct influence on the development of Islam and Buddhism. Some of Jenkins assertions are probably not going to be politically correct (he disputes the concept of a religiously tolerant Islam), and his history of the US choosing to support anti-Communist Muslim governments over pro-Palestinian Christians in the Middle East makes one wonder what might be happening new if the situation had been reversed. An interesting book, both for Christian history readers, and those wanting to take a new look at just how the church was formed, developed and might yet change again.
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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
absolutely fascinating, December 15, 2008
My view of the history of Christianity always had been one that began in the Middle East, then quickly spread west, roughly following the outline of the Roman Empire until the Middle East and Africa were lost to Islam. We'd always heard that Thomas the Apostle had gone to India, but it seemed as though that was an anomalous dead end. In the mid- to late-Middle Ages, the "center" of Christianity involved the trials and tribulations of the eventual rival Greek and Latin Churches, with a few tiny sects (Nestorians, Coptics, Maronites) eking out an existence in isolated pockets on the outskirts.
(I do hesitate to use the word "sect," as it so often seems to connote "wayward minority." History is written by the winners - one can imagine a time when the number of Muslims in the world dwarfs the number of Catholics, with the latter being thought of as a heretical version of the True Faith.)
This book lifts Christianity's first-millennium center of mass and moves it a thousand miles to the ESE. It opened my eyes to the fact that Christianity was thriving in Central Asia and further east, including even a major presence in Japan, and for a very long time. Also, importantly, it makes obvious the overriding role that luck plays in the success or failure of the spread of religion. If the Mongols had adopted Christianity instead of Islam, the world would be a different place. (Rather, was it the Almighty's wish that the Mongols adopted Islam and not Christianity!?)
I must say that the author seemed to be awfully repetitive in the first fourth of the book, and I felt as though I was being hit over the head with a hammer. On the other hand, maybe that's not a bad thing, given the nature of the material.
Over all, this was a fairly well written and an absolutely fascinating read.
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14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Where and why Christianity survived and thrived, December 9, 2008
Two thousands years removed from scene, when the Apostle Paul includes Asian Christians in the salutation to some of his epistles, it is easy to read with an ironic and chuckle, knowing that he is referring just to the Byzantine "East", and just for the next 500 years or so until the Middle East would be conquered and converted to Islam. We know that Christianity would only survive and thrive in the Roman west, becoming a European religion; after all, a majority of Americans can trace their roots to that geographic and religious locus.
And we would be wrong, as Jenkins reminds us here in his rediscovery of the early history of the spread and survival of Christianity in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. Jenkins shows that Christianity has a mostly forgotten history in Egypt and Ethiopia to the south, and India, China, and even Japan to the east, and that it was successful in different languages, cultures and political systems until the 14th century, with remnants surviving in many places to the present day. These communities would be strong and large enough to lend creedence to the European legends of Prester John, the powerful and benevolent Christian king whose kingdom was always just off the edges of the known map.
Of course, we know that beginning with the Islamic conquests of the 7th century, and increasing with periods of political violence and reprisals in the 14th century, Christianity in these regions was existing in areas where it faced serious limits on growth and survival, and Jenkins tells how these events impacted those Christian communities.
Hugh Kennedy in The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In tells the story of the Islamic conquests, explaining its rapidity in part by its ability to accommodate and subsume conquered peoples and religions without violent reprisals and forced conversions--at first. Jenkins extends this history, pointing out how in those early years Christianity and Islam shared many ideas and even borrowed from each other in those areas where they were in close contact. He also carries the story forward over the next several centuries to the period in the 14th century when reprisals did become common, and offers some reasons for the hardening of Islam into a more directly anti-Christian theology.
Jenkins then generalizes from this history to talk about how and why any religious faith and practice dies or survives under periods of persecution. He also addresses the question of why God would allow such seemingly disastrous results in the history of His church after He has commanded the church to carry His name to the whole world, and promised to protect it. As he concludes, understanding God's role in the history of Christianity requires knowing the complete history (not just its history in European Christian political entities), and thinking in God's timing and standards of success (not our own).
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by Philip Jenkins
by Philip Jenkins
