Christians in Asia before 1500

Ian Gilman, Hans-Joachim Klimkeit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136109782
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The history of Christianity in Asia is little dealt with either by Church historians or by historians of religion. It is generally unknown, even amongst theologians, that there was a long history of Christianity in Persia, India, Central Asia and China before the appearance on the scene of the first missionaries from the West. A systematic history of the Christian Church in Asia before 1500 is needed. Drawing on material hitherto unknown in the English speaking world, this is a timely and important book because there is a heightened interest today in the early forms of Asian Christianity. The Church in Asia today seeks to find forms of religious expression that are in harmony with Asian culture as was the case in the earlier period. The book covers the period up to 1500 CE. The geographical areas dealt with are Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, Central and South East Asia, China and Japan. The book takes into account the outward development of the Church in these areas as well as the inner, theological issues.

Chapter 1

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Introduction

‘Christians in Asia before 1500!?’ This is likely to be the response of most people in the countries long occupied and more recently settled by Europeans. Such a response is not limited to those who have at best a marginal interest in the history of Christianity. It will be found also among many devout Christians and even among those who have undergone some systematic theological education. In part this response has its roots in ignorance – and that is forgivable to a degree. Less open to forgiveness are the various ‘imperialisms’ which undergird that ignorance. These are of three major types – political, intellectual and Scriptural.

The age of ‘Western’ imperialism, in terms of colonial empires, has almost passed, whatever may be said about it having been succeeded by forms of economic and ideological colonialism. The vestiges of ‘Western’ political colonialism to be found in such places as the South Pacific are under close scrutiny by the world community. But the ways of thinking built up over 400 years, since the Portuguese and Spanish began to build such empires in Africa, Asia and the Americas, have not passed out of currency among Europeans and their descendants elsewhere.

There remains ingrained within the consciousness and subconsciousness of such peoples a sense of superiority in things political, moral and technological. As Christianity has been intertwined with European history for well over 1600 years it is not unnatural, although it may be illogical, to extend that sense of primacy for things European to the area of Christianity also. It is assumed that Christianity is as ‘Western’ in its origins and its normative expressions as is ‘Coca-Cola’, regardless of where in the world it is found today.

There exists also in the minds of ‘Westerners’ a form of intellectual imperialism. It is rooted in the dramatic achievements of ancient Graeco-Roman civilization, and in the development of ‘Western’ scholarship since the Renaissance (14th-16th centuries) and the Enlightenment (17th-18th centuries). There is much here to explain the assumption of the superiority, as well as the distinctiveness of ‘Western’ intellectual processes and achievements. The legacies of Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Rene Descartes (1596–1650), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Isaac Newton (1642–1727) and Albert Einstein (1879–1955) have included also, for Westerners today, an assumption that their ways of arriving at the truth of a matter are the only valid ways. Businessmen who enter negotiations with the Japanese or Chinese have learned to modify any such assumptions they bring to trade negotiations, if they are to attain their commercial objectives. Western scholars have not yet shown the same readiness to accept the possibility that there may be ways to the truth other than those to which they are accustomed. There is still much to be learned from such a book as that of Hajime Nakamura, entitled Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India, China, Tibet, Japan, first published by East West Center Press in 1964.

Not to be prepared to learn and not uncritically to understand, is to cut oneself off from alternative, and by no means inappropriate ways of arriving at valid conclusions. And it is to subject such Asian peoples to a form of imperialism no less arrogantly presumptuous than was that of the Conquistadors.

If a number of these assumptions lie deep, and are but rarely if ever recognized by ‘Westerners’ and those who have absorbed such ‘Western’ attitudes, there is another imperialism that has a particular effect on Christians from such lands. It is not only that, on the whole, they have tended to focus attention on the development of Latin Christianity, in both its Catholic and Protestant expressions, in their awareness of church history. This has been tragic enough in that it has resulted in their being largely ignorant of the great tradition represented by Eastern Orthodoxy, and those age-old Churches which developed outside the boundaries of the ancient Roman Empire.

It goes deeper than that, for it is grounded in, and given normalcy by, the very shape of the New Testament. The list of books accepted as authoritative and which make up the New Testament today (i.e. the canon) was determined in the West over a number of centuries. While the gospels and much of the Acts of the Apostles concern people and events in Palestine, Egypt and Syria and have one reference to Arabia, the bulk of the epistles and the Revelation of St. John are applied primarily to areas west of the ‘Middle East’ (itself a European convention, as an Australian knows full well, for he must regard the so-called ‘Middle East’ as the ‘Middle North-West’, and the ‘Far East’ as the ‘Middle and Far North’). That, and the primacies of the Bishops of Rome in the Latin ‘West’ and of the Bishops of Constantinople in the Greek ‘East’, have conspired to give to ‘Western’ presumptions something of the sanctity of Holy Writ itself. Nothing in the New Testament readings, heard Sunday by Sunday for centuries, has spurred Western Christians to think further east than the River Jordan and the Gadarene area of the Decapolis in their environing of Christianity in the first few centuries of this era.

Of course, when pressed, such Christians will admit quite readily that their religion had its beginnings in Asia among Asians, and this despite the fact that some artists in the West have depicted Jesus as if he were of Nordic origins. They may even admit that Christianity has its roots in Asia as much as does Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism – not to mention Judaism. Not one of the great world religions had its origin in Europe – whatever the influence of European thought and categories etc. upon them. This very fact, in a somewhat paradoxical fashion may help to explain why Westerners want to think that Christianity is in some way ‘European’ – a sort of religious gamesmanship not unrelated to the desire to have an apostle as the founder of your particular Church.

Linked to the above ‘imperialisms’ is a consequence of them and the historical development of those forms of Christianity with which Westerners are familiar. There can be no doubt that contemporary expressions of Christianity, Catholic, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox, show not only traces of the religion's roots in Judaism but also the strong influence of Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic and neo-Platonic thought – and one might add Manichaeism also in the case of that great formative thinker, Augustine of Hippo (d. AD 430). Prime examples of such influences, familiar to all, are the widespread belief of many Christians in the ‘immortality of the soul’, a belief most commonly associated with Plato, which stands in contrast to the Christian doctrine of the ‘resurrection of the body’ the extolling of Stoic virtues as if, per se, they were Christian; the tendency to regard ‘ignorance’ as a sin more dangerous than ‘wilful autonomy’ and the denigration of the ‘material world’ and the exaltation of ‘things spiritual’. Amongst those of the Catholic and Protestant traditions there is evident also the influence of the Roman legal cast of mind. Perhaps this is most obvious in such phenomena as the belief that every ‘mystery’ of the faith can be and should be defined, even those of the ‘how’ of the Eucharist, and the ways in which God's grace and human response are related to each other. It appears also in those theories of the atonement which are dependent on the work of Anselm of Canterbury (d. AD 1109) with the consequent difficulty experienced in relating such legalistic theories to the essential ‘union symbolism’ of the two great sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion.

That all this has led to a form of syncretism, to varying degrees, in Latin and Greek Christianity is as undeniable as it is inevitable. What is unjustifiable is the conviction held by many from those same traditions that, while their forms of syncretism are not only permissible but also divinely approved, the syncretisms of others put the ‘faith once delivered to the saints’ in jeopardy. This attitude set at nought the valiant attempts of Matteo Ricci S.J. (d. AD 1610) in China and of Roberto di Nobili S.J. (d. AD 1656) in South India, to provide expressions of Christianity less dependent on the Graeco-Roman heritage and more attuned to those of Confucianism and of Hinduism respectively. Such efforts were condemned by the Vatican and discontinued at its insistent direction, until greater wisdom prevailed in the latter half of this century.

The fear of non-European syncretism, thus implanted, has been for generations an unwarranted hindrance to the development of valid expressions of Christianity in Asia and elsewhere, expressions which relate more closely to the cultures involved. While it may be superficially comforting for the Western visitor to find Protestants in Japan worshipping and theologizing in ways distinctively European and North American, it is at depth disturbing. Western attitudes and demands have combined with local fears of wandering back into old attitudes from which they have been delivered, to make it difficult to be both authentically Christian and authentically Japanese – a problem with which Japanese Christians are by no means unfamiliar.

Last, in this catalogue of Western ‘failures' is the heritage of text-books and teachers who have encouraged generations of children to believe that Vasco da Gama (d. AD 1524) ‘discovered’ India in 1498. That he found a new way to India via the Cape of Good Hope, and had the help of an Indian pilot for the last leg from the east coast of Africa tends to be glossed over. That India was long known in and traded with by ancient Europe, and that it had a succession of visitors from Europe who wrote of their experiences there up until several decades before da Gama's arrival in 1498 is either unknown or ignored. Yet who has not heard of Marco Polo (d. AD 1324) at least? Such facts have been obscured as thoroughly as has knowledge of the epic Chinese voyages to Africa, and possibly to Australia, in the 14th century. The European sense of supremacy is made uncomfortable by such facts.

No less discomforting is the ‘news’ that Christianity had reached and been founded in China within a generation of the death of Augustine of Canterbury in AD 604. It seems hard for many to credit that missionaries were on their way east to China at the same time as Augustine was travelling north-west from Rome, passing a number of Irish-founded monasteries, on his way to England; – and all of this some 120 years before Boniface began the evangelisation of Germany. Likewise it is ‘news’ to most that the first country to adopt Christianity on a national basis was Armenia, about a decade before the religion was granted toleration in the Roman Empire, and almost eighty years before it was established as the official religion of that Empire. As a final straw there may come the shattering revelation that Christians in South India have a long-held claim to the foundation of their Church by the Apostle Thomas, a claim virtually as old and as strong as that of Rome to St. Peter and far better substantiated than those of Scotland and Russia to St. Andrew.

Perhaps the strangeness of all this is best captured by the following passage from D. F. Lach and C. Flaumenhaft, a description which applies strictly not to the arrival of the first Portuguese fleet under da Gama, but to that of the second fleet in 1500 under Pedro Cabral (d. AD 1526). Nevertheless, its impact and ‘the turning on the head’ of our usual presuppositions are salutary:

‘How would Portugal and Europe have reacted in 1498 if they had been “discovered” by Asians? Suppose several strange ships manned by odd-looking foreigners had dropped anchor at Lisbon, and, after a friendly reception by the King, had suddenly bombarded some ships in Lisbon harbour before sailing off with a trio of hostages to some unknown destination.’¹

Numbers of Western and Asian scholars have been aware for generations that such presumptions as those outlined here are invalid despite the breadth of their currency. Detailed studies of the history, growth and decline, literature and art of Christians across Asia before 1500, have appeared in both scholarly journals and in books which have had limited circulations. The most complete treatment, together with a survey of literature, is to be found in P. Kawerau, Ostkirchengeschichte, I: Das Christentum in Asien und Afrika bis zum Auftreten der Portugiesen im Indischen Ozean, Louvain 1983 (CSCO.Sub 70). Readers are referred also to a work published in the final stage af the preparation of this volume, viz. S. H. Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, vol. 1: Beginnings to 1500, San Francisco 1992. The authors of this volume are convinced that the time has long since come when Christians outside Asia were made aware of the long history and achievements of those of their faith in that continent before the arrival of da Gama. Equally they are convinced that Christians in Asia today should be aware and proud of the heritage that is theirs, and so be able to cast off once and for all, any necessity to be regarded as ‘younger Churches’ – a title which carried with it echoes of the paternalism of the ‘West’.

But what is meant by ‘Asia’ in this context? For our purposes it is that land mass and the islands off shore, to the east of the coastline of modern Israel, Lebanon and Syria, and the eastern shores of the Black Sea, to Japan; and south of the 60° N parallel of latitude to include modern Indonesia. The major areas which will concern us will be ancient and medieval Syria and Arabia, Armenia, Georgia, Mesopotamia, Iran, Afghanistan, India, Sri Lanka, Central Asia, Mongolia and China; with some reference to Tibet, South-East Asia, Indonesia and Japan. Within this are to be found today the world's two most populous nations and by far most of the world's Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims. For all that, it is an area all too easily by-passed by Europeans and North Americans in their apprehensions of the world.

It is our hope that this survey will increase awareness among Christians at least, and promote greater understanding.

FURTHER READING

Nakamura, H.: Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples. India, China, Tibet, Japan, Honolulu 1964 - To read the Introduction would provide useful insights on its own.

Lach, D. F. … Flaumenhaft, C. (eds.): Asia on the Eve of Europe's Expansion, Englewood Cliffs, N.J. 1965.

Panikkar, K. M.: Asia and Western Dominance, 5th impr., London 1959.

Lach, D. F.: Asia in the Making of Europe, vol. 1, 2nd ed., Chicago 1971.

Chapter 2

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Apostolic Times and Apostolic Traditions

If you were to walk down the Strand in London, leaving Trafalgar Square behind you, until you reached the famed ‘oranges and lemons’ church of St. Clement's Dane you would have passed Somerset House on your right and be within a few paces of St. Catherine's House. If then you proceeded to Chancery Lane you would find the census records room in the Public Records Office. In any one of these places, the census records office, St. Catherine's House or Somerset House, you will encounter on any week day, dozens of people intent on a quest. In the census records office they stare at the screens of microfilm readers, in a room filled with rows of these machines. At St. Catherine's House they will be poring over large volumes listing births, deaths and marriages. In Somerset House they will be searching for and examining wills and other legal documents related to the estates of those long dead.

You will hear, also, a babel of accents and the ages of the researchers will range from those in the late teens to those of advanced years. There will be cries of exaltation and groans of despair. Some will leave with an air of pleasure and achievement; others will wear looks of frustration and disappointment. All of them are about the task of unearthing their ‘roots’, by tracing ancestors — if they can find them in the records.

Such an interest has increased among many in the West in recent years and genealogy is a growth area, as publishers can testify. Yet it is not something entirely new, for knowing a family tree has been of significance to many, in so far as it applies not only to humans, but also to such as horses, cats and dogs, for example. Nor is it a matter of common concern only for colleges of heralds or family or clan societies in Europe, North America and elsewhere. In a society as different from these as was that of the Pacific Islanders, being able to recite accurately the names of one's ancestors for a large number of generations was commonplace, and this long before that society had committed its languages to writing. The same could be said for non-literate societies elsewhere.

While this activity remains important for a range of people from royalty to greyhound breeders, it has had, also, a deep significance for the Church. For centuries lists have been kept of the names of bishops of dioceses and of ministers of parishes. If these lists have about them, in earliest times, more of an air of hopeful imagination than of hard fact, this seems to cause little concern despite the fact that much hangs on such succession lists. While on one hand the Roman claim to primacy in the Church rests on the contention that the Bishop of Rome is the successor today of Simon Peter, the chief apostle, others go back one step further and claim to be in ‘succession from Christ’. So the secular genealogists have parallels in the ecclesiastical realm.

One of the boons for those who research their own family is that they may find that they have one or more distinguished ancestors. Human nature is such ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Christians in Asia before 1500
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Maps and Plates
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Apostolic Times and Apostolic Traditions
• 3 A Necessary Excursus into Theology
• 4 Christians in Syria and Palestine
• 5 Christians in ‘Arabia’
• 6 Christians in Armenia and Georgia
• 7 Christians in Persia (Iran)
• 8 Christians in India
• 9 Christians in Central Asia
• 10 Christians in China
• 11 Christians in South—East Asia
• 12 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index