by Philip Jenkins

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review by David J. Robinson

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died— “What a long title,” I thought as I saw the book for the first time. In my experience, I have found that the longer the title, the more boring its contents. However, this book is not boring. It is a fascinating account of the rapid expansion of the Christian faith into the East and South, with the subsequent death of that part of the Church of Jesus Christ. While filled with exceptional research and scholarship, it is not a scholarly book. At just over 260 pages, it will be easily read by most who are interested in our church history.

If someone had asked me, before I’d read this book, to say where the center of gravity of the Christian world was in the seventh century, I would have answered confidently, Constantinople. Philip Jenkins has now taught me that my answer would have been wrong; the correct answer is Mesopotamia. Does that surprise you as much as it did me? My church history education followed the details of the expansion of the church throughout Europe and, following the Reformation, to the United States, and subsequently through the modern missions movement to the rest of the world. There were only incidental references to the Eastern Church, as if it were some appendage that dropped off over time. Jenkins chronicles for us how 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.

This part of the church was known primarily as Nestorian and Jacobite, which a large segment of the mainline church has deemed heretical in its views of how Christ’s divinity and humanity existed in His person. But these Christians took the Great Commission seriously and expanded significantly. Jenkins points out that much of what today exists as an Islamic world was once Christian. Perhaps one third of the world’s Christians lived in Asia and one tenth in Africa by the eleventh century. The thriving Christian communities throughout the Middle East—now known as Syria and Iraq—became legendary centers of culture and science by the year 800, a level that European churches would not achieve till the thirteenth century.

Jenkins shows that Christianity has a mostly forgotten history in Egypt and Ethiopia to the south; 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. For example, St. Augustine was leader of the North African church from Carthage, yet his city-oriented church could not survive the spread of Islam. The Coptic churches of Egypt were able to survive after over 1,000 years of Islamic rule with a strong remnant still active.

The book is filled with some intriguing facts that I found fascinating:

• Christianity has been tainted with a Western polish that does not accurately reflect the historic beginnings.
• Many of the great leaders such as Timothy, Patriarch of the East in 780, have been all but lost due to the destruction of Eastern Christianity.
• The Eastern Churches in the East endeavored to tell the good news in Buddhist style to reach out peacefully to them (rather than the confrontational and oppositional approach of later churches).
• The surviving Patriarch of the Middle Eastern Assyrian Church now lives in Chicago.
• Genocide is the term which was coined to describe the massacre of Assyrian Christians by Muslims in 1933.
• The Ottoman Turks slaughtered 800,000 to 1,000,000 Armenians in a massacre rarely mentioned alongside other historical genocides.

Jenkins concludes the book by asking the question, “how do we explain the failures?” What if Christians make disciples of all peoples and then lose them or their subsequent generations? He draws some interesting conclusions, which I found somewhat lacking in definitive answers. On the other hand, who can find definitive answers to these complex questions? I believe readers will find this book enlightening, well written, and full of fascinating information. It’s a book that will delight anyone interested in world history.

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