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Recovering Church History: Exile from Babylon

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  • Recovering Church History: Exile from Babylon

    Recovering Church History: Exile from Babylon

    The Iraqi Christian community, now nearly gone, was the church's
    center for a millennium.
    Philip Jenkins | posted 12/31/2008


    Across much of the Middle East, the ancient Christian story seems to
    be coming to a bloody end almost before our eyes. The most dramatic
    catastrophe in recent years has been that of Iraq's Christians, who
    represented 5-6 percent of Iraq's population in 1970. That number is
    now below 1 percent, and shrinking fast in the face of persecution and
    ethnic/religious cleansing.

    Western Christians watch this story in horror, but few claim detailed
    knowledge of the situation, or can easily recognize the Iraqi churches
    we read of in the news. Are they perhaps the survivors of some
    Victorian missionary enterprise? we wonder.

    Actually, understanding the history of Iraq's churches should make us
    still more keenly aware of the tragedy we see unfolding. Not only are
    these churches - Chaldean, Assyrian, Orthodox - truly ancient, they
    are survivals from the earliest history of the church. For centuries
    indeed, the land long known as Mesopotamia had a solid claim to rank
    as the center of the church and an astonishing record of missions and
    evangelism. What we see today in Iraq isnot just the death of a
    church, but also the end of one of the most awe-inspiring phases of
    Christian history.The Church Goes Back to Ur Mesopotamia was so vital
    to early Christians because it was firmly part of the ancient
    civilized world, connected to the Mediterranean by flourishing trade
    routes, while at the same time, it usually lay beyond the Roman
    Empire's political power.

    When they faced persecution in Syria or Palestine, early Christians
    tended to move east, where they joined the ancient Jewish communities
    based in Babylon. These churches were rooted in the oldest traditions
    of the apostolic church. Throughout their history, they used Syriac,
    which is close to Jesus' language of Aramaic, and they followed
    Yeshua, not Jesus.

    When the Roman Empire became Christian, Mesopotamia became the main
    refuge for those theological currents that the empire now labeled
    heretical: the Monophysites or Jacobites, and the
    Nestorians. Ultimately, most of the Christians of modern Iraq look to
    one of these movements as their spiritual ancestor.

    Once outside Roman oversight, Christian leaders were free to establish
    their own churches. The main Christian church in the Persian Empire
    was based in the twin cities of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the successor to
    ancient Babylon and the most populous city in the world at that
    time. This church followed the teachings of Nestorius after 431. In
    498, its head, the Katholikos, took the title of Patriarch of Babylon,
    the Patriarch of the East. When Muslims in their turn established
    their own empire, overthrowing the Persians, the Katholikos moved his
    capital to Baghdad.

    Syriac-speaking Christianity found a stronghold in Mesopotamia, around
    the northern reaches of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. Today, the
    older place names have vanished and bear no relationship to modern
    state divisions; in terms of modern nations, we are speaking of the
    area where modern Iraq, Turkey, and Syria come together, where
    activists now struggle to create a new Kurdistan. The region includes
    many names that are often in the news as centers of political violence
    and instability. For centuries, the major churches here were as famous
    as any in Christian Europe, although their story is now quite
    forgotten in the West.

    >From the 4th century through the 14th, Iraq had many centers of
    Christian scholarship and devotion. Apart from Baghdad itself, the
    Church of the East had metropolitans at Basra, Kirkuk, and
    Erbil. Jacobite leaders often made their home in Tikrit, which served
    as the seat of the Maphrianus (Consecrator), head of the Jacobite
    church throughout the East. Tikrit in modern times gained notoriety as
    the home of Saddam Hussein and his Sunni Muslim al-Tikriti clan.

    Mosul, too, had its stellar Christian past. And surrounding the cities
    were hundreds of monasteries that were certainly equal to anything in,
    say, contemporary Ireland in terms of scholarly tradition.

    These Mesopotamian monasteries were also the base camps for one of the
    greatest missionary enterprises in Christian history. Especially
    between the 7th and 9th centuries, the Church of the East was
    establishing bishoprics and metropolitans across Asia - through
    Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, into Tibet and Kyrgyzstan, and as far as
    India and China.Scapegoats for Global Cooling Looking at the world in
    850 or so, few observers would have doubted that the Christian future
    lay in the Middle East and Asia, rather than in the barbarian-ravaged
    lands of Western Europe.

    Insofar as they know the story of Christianity in the East, Westerners
    generally assume that those churches must have shriveled quite soon
    after the rise of Islam during the 7th and 8th centuries. Actually,
    the decline was much slower; Iraq's churches and monasteries were
    still booming well into the 12th and 13th centuries.

    What effectively finished them off were the Mongol invasions and their
    aftermath, which devastated most of Central Asia and the Middle East
    from the 1220s onwards. Also, in the late-13th century, the world
    entered a terrifying era of global cooling, which severely cut food
    supplies and contributed to mass famine.

    Meanwhile, the collapse of trade and commerce crippled cities, leaving
    the world much poorer and more vulnerable. A hungry and desperate
    society looked for scapegoats. Europe's Christians turned on Jews,
    killing and expelling hundreds of thousands; in Mesopotamia and
    elsewhere, Muslims inflicted a similar fate upon their Christian
    neighbors.

    Christian communities were uprooted or wiped out across the Middle
    East, and ceased to exist in most of Central Asia. Churches suffered
    mass closure or destruction, including at such ancient centers as
    Erbil, Mosul, and Baghdad.

    Bishops and clergy were tortured and imprisoned.

    Christianity survived, but was confined to poorer and more remote
    regions.

    The Patriarchs of "Babylon" now literally headed for the hills: in
    later centuries, patriarchs made their home at the Rabban Hormizd
    monastery, in the mountains near Mosul. Iraq's shining Christian
    millennium had ended.

    The final phase of the Mesopotamian churches began with the First
    World War, when the Muslim Ottoman Empire began slaughtering
    Christians across its territory. Among others, they targeted the
    Assyrians - that is, thelast remnants of the Nestorian church that had
    once carried the faith of Yeshua to the Pacific Ocean.

    (The Nestorians had split into the Chaldeans, who accepted papal
    authority, and the Assyrian church, which retained its
    independence. The ancient Jacobites, meanwhile, became known as Syrian
    Orthodox.) Matters scarcely improved under the successor states
    established on the ruins of Ottoman rule. In 1933, Muslim forces in
    the new nation of Iraq launched a deadly assault on the surviving
    communities of the Assyrian peoples.

    Government-sponsored militias cleansed much of the far north of Iraq
    of its Assyrian population, killing thousands and eliminating dozens
    of villages.

    So shocking were the purges that they demanded new legal
    vocabulary. Some months afterwards, Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael
    Lemkin used the cases of the Assyrians, and the Christian Armenians
    before them, to argue for a new legal category of Crimes of Barbarity:
    "acts of extermination directed against the ethnic, religious, or
    social collectivities whatever the motive (political, religious,
    etc.)." A great humanitarian, Lemkin developed this theme over the
    following years, and in 1943, he coined a new word for this atrocious
    behavior, namely genocide. The modern concept of genocide as a
    uniquely horrible act demanding international sanctions has its roots
    in the thoroughly successful movements to eradicate Middle Eastern
    Christians.Almost Gone Christians did fairly well under the secular
    and nationalist rule of the Ba'ath Party, which rejected Muslim
    domination. In fact, Christians had originally helped found the
    Ba'ath, and long remained among its greatest supporters.

    Saddam's foreign minister and deputy Tariq Aziz was by origin a member
    of the Chaldean church, and bore the purely Christian name of Mikhail
    Yuhanna, "Michael John." Reportedly, 20 percent of Iraq's teachers, as
    well as manyof its doctors and engineers, were Christian then.

    But international events took their toll. The nation's economy was
    devastated by two wars, against Iran in the 1980s and against the
    U.S.-led Coalition in 1990-91, and the painful international sanctions
    that followed. These events provoked the exodus of everyone who could
    leave easily, which usually meant those professional groups, among
    whom Christians were well represented.

    The second invasion of 2003 proved the final straw by unleashing
    Muslim militancy, both Sunni and Shi'ite, while removing any central
    policing authority.

    In the ensuing anarchy, Christians became primary targets of mobs and
    militias. Since that point, the story of Iraq's Christianity has been
    a catalog of persecution and martyrdom. Just between 2003 and 2007,
    two-thirds of Iraq's remaining Christians left the country, and the
    population will certainly shrink further in coming years, probably to
    a vanishing point.

    What we are seeing then is the death of one of the world's greatest
    Christian enterprises. Certainly, its glory days were far behind it.
    Recall what William Wordsworth wrote when the Republic of Venice was
    snuffed out after centuries of dominating the Mediterranean world:
    And what if she had seen those glories fade,
    Those titles vanish, and that strength decay?
    Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid
    When her long life hath reach'd its final day:
    Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade
    Of that which once was great is pass'd away.

    How could we mourn dying churches less than dead republics? Philip
    Jenkins is the author of The Lost History of Christianity: The
    Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and
    Asia - and How It Died
    (http://www.christianbook.com/Christian/Books /product?item_no=3D472801&p=3D1006327)
    (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008)

    Copyright © 2008 Christianity Today
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