Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion

Two Thousand Years of Christian Missions in the Middle East

Eleanor H. Tejirian, Reeva Spector Simon

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9780231511094
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Conflict, Conquest, and Conversion surveys two thousand years of the Christian missionary enterprise in the Middle East within the context of the region's political evolution. Its broad, rich narrative follows Christian missions as they interacted with imperial powers and as the momentum of religious change shifted from Christianity to Islam and back, adding new dimensions to the history of the region and the nature of the relationship between the Middle East and the West.

Historians and political scientists increasingly recognize the importance of integrating religion into political analysis, and this volume, using long-neglected sources, uniquely advances this effort. It surveys Christian missions from the earliest days of Christianity to the present, paying particular attention to the role of Christian missions, both Protestant and Catholic, in shaping the political and economic imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Eleanor H. Tejirian and Reeva Spector Simon delineate the ongoing tensions between conversion and the focus on witness and "good works" within the missionary movement, which contributed to the development and spread of nongovernmental organizations. Through its conscientious, systematic study, this volume offers an unparalleled encounter with the social, political, and economic consequences of such trends.

ONE

The Spread of Christianity

The First Thousand Years

As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon who is called Peter and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And he said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him. (Matthew 4:18–19 RSV)

Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him they worshiped him; but some doubted. And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age.” (Matthew 28:16–20 RSV)

The first story recounts Jesus’s recruitment of the first missionaries, the twelve disciples who followed him during his lifetime. Peter and Simon were followed by two more brothers, James and John (the “sons of thunder”), and then by Philip, Bartholomew, Thomas, Matthew, James (the Less), Thaddeus (called Jude), Simon the Zealot, and finally Judas, later accused of betraying Jesus to the Romans. The stories of the travels of the first eleven, though perhaps apocryphal in many cases, give us a clear idea of the lands to which the Christian message was thought to have been carried in the first century, the apostolic period. The second story, referred to as the “Great Commission,” is the touchstone for the evangelical foreign missions of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

Peter preached first in Jerusalem and then in Rome, where he was martyred in 67 CE. His brother Andrew is reputed to have gone to Thrace, Constantinople, and Macedonia and was martyred in Patros in Greece. There is also a tradition that he traveled to Georgia in the Caucasus and preached to the Scythians near the Caspian Sea. By tradition, James was martyred in Jerusalem in 44; his brother John remained in Jerusalem until just prior to the Jewish revolt against Rome in 66–70, when he went to Ephesus. He is reputed to have remained in exile on the island of Patmos until his death in 100, writing several of the books included in the New Testament canon: the Gospel According to John; the letters designated First, Second, and Third John; and the final book, Revelation. Philip is thought to have gone from Galilee to Galatia in present-day Turkey and was martyred at Hieropolis at the age of eighty-seven. Bartholomew also went to Hieropolis, then variously to India and Armenia, where he is thought to have been martyred at Derbend, on the west coast of the Caspian Sea, in 68. It was Thomas who went to Babylon and may have established the first Christian church there. From there he is thought to have gone on to Persia, India, and even as far as China. He was martyred in India. Matthew, the author of the Gospel, is also thought to have traveled to Persia and may have been martyred there or alternatively in Egypt. Mark, regarded as the founder of the Coptic Church, is said to have proselytized in North Africa.¹ There are few traditions concerning James the Less, though he may have been the first bishop of the Syrian Church. Jude is also thought to have evangelized the region of Armenia in Anatolia, around Edessa (modern Urfa), which emerged as a major center of early Christianity. However, there is also a tradition that he worked in northern Persia as well, where he may have been martyred and buried near Tabriz.

The focus of these traditions on the eastern Roman world and the realms even farther east beyond Roman control is striking evidence of the dispersion of Jewish communities throughout the Roman and Persian empires, which were the disciples’ first targets. Only Peter, who with Paul went to Rome, and the last disciple, Simon (the Zealot), are thought to have gone west. Tradition indicates that he went to Egypt, Mauritania, and even Britain, though even he is thought to have gone also to Persia.

Peter clearly emerged as the leader of the disciples from the beginning, and the enumeration of the countries in whose native languages his message was heard in Jerusalem provides further evidence of the scope of the earliest missionary enterprise: “And how is it that we hear, each of us in his own native language, Parthians and Medes and Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God?” (Acts 2:8–11 RSV).

From the beginning, the primary target of the disciples’ mission was fellow Jews, scattered throughout the Roman Empire, for Jesus regarded himself as the fulfillment of the prophecy of a Jewish messiah. Whether and how the message should be extended also to non-Jews was a major source of contention within the nascent church in the first century.

Omitted from this list of the twelve disciples are two major figures of the early expansion of what came to be called Christianity. One is James, the brother of Jesus, who obviously knew Jesus but was not one of his small band of followers. The other is Paul, originally called Saul. Paul’s “conversion” on the road to Damascus is one of the seminal stories of the New Testament.

At midday … I saw on the way a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, shining round me and those who journeyed with me. And when we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me … Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? And I said, “Who are you, Lord?” And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. But rise and stand upon your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and bear witness to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you, delivering you from the people and from the Gentiles—to whom I send you to open their eyes, that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me. (Acts of the Apostles 26:13–18 RSV)

Paul was probably born in Tarsus in Cilicia, a cosmopolitan city founded by the Persians in the fourth century BCE and conquered by Rome in the second century. His family appears to have been tent makers and Roman citizens, though Jews. His daily language would have been Greek, though he would also have known Aramaic. When he went to Jerusalem in 28 to study to be a Pharisee, he took the name “Saul.” This was his first conversion—from Diaspora Judaism, which owed much to Greek thought, to Pharisaic Judaism as practiced in the Temple in Jerusalem.² After spending four years in Jerusalem, he was sent to Damascus to counter the increasing influence of the Jesus cult there, at which point he had the vision described earlier.

As we think about missionary practice in early Christianity, it is important to understand that Paul’s conversion did not come about as a result of missionary preaching, but from what he felt was a personal experience with Jesus. Unlike later conversions that resulted from his preaching and that of the apostles, he himself was not the object of missionary preaching. He did not begin to preach immediately but instead spent three years in “Arabia” (probably Nabatea) and then returned home to Tarsus. Thus, he does not appear to have regarded the charge on the road to Damascus as an immediate demand that he go out to convert the Gentiles. However, that charge does seem to have implied that he could endeavor to convert Gentiles directly to “Christianity” without first converting them to Judaism.

Paul undertook his first missionary journey in 42 CE, ten years after his conversion, and from then until his execution in Rome in 64 he crisscrossed the Roman Empire from Jerusalem to Asia Minor to Greece, establishing churches in many centers as reflected in the letters contained in the New Testament. He went first to Cyprus and then to Antioch on the Orontes, far from Jerusalem. However, by 46 sufficient controversy had arisen within the small Christian communities over the requirements for salvation that Paul found it necessary to return to Jerusalem to meet with Peter and James, the brother of Jesus, who had assumed leadership of the Jerusalem community. At this meeting, spheres of influence in proselytization were established: “Peter, Barnabas, and those like them would direct their attention to Jews and God-fearers [pagans who accepted the Jewish God] in the synagogues of Israel and lands contiguous with Israel.” Paul could make his way outside that large region (into Asia Minor, for example) with what he calls the apostolate “of foreskin”—that is, for Gentiles.³

Thus, Paul left Jerusalem for Philippi in Greece and then went on to Thessalonika, Athens, and Corinth, where he remained until 52. During this period, he began to write the letters that were eventually included in the New Testament and that represent the earliest written Christian literature.

In 52, Paul returned again to Jerusalem to try to achieve agreement with James on issues of conversion. James continued to insist that acceptance of the Jewish Torah was required for baptism, a position that Paul opposed. Peter, working in Antioch, accepted James’s position, and in 53 Paul left Antioch for Ephesus, where he remained for three years, becoming “an apostle for the faith of the Gentiles in the Diaspora.”⁴ In 57, Paul paid a final visit to James in Jerusalem, and when they were unable to reach agreement, Paul was thrown out of the Temple, beaten, and arrested by the Romans. As a Roman citizen, he asked to be taken to Rome for judgment, where he continued to preach. He no longer depended on synagogues for preaching, and he felt no dependence on Jerusalem. In 64, Nero, blaming the Christians for the great fire in Rome, launched persecutions during which Paul was beheaded, and Peter, who had also come to Rome, was crucified (upside down, according to tradition). Paul had already cut his ties with Judaism.

Although Paul himself had not been converted by a human agent, his method of conversion of others was preaching, frequently in synagogues or the homes of believers. Several aspects of his life and preaching resonate in the Protestant missionary enterprise of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. First, Paul’s own conversion experience led him to regard it as being “born again,” represented by the ceremony of baptism. Second, James and Paul found it necessary to divide the territory of their proselytizing to prevent confusion and conflict, as Protestants would do in the nineteenth century. Third, repeatedly in his career Paul fell back on his family’s trade of tent making as a way of earning a living while continuing his preaching. The concept of “tent makers”—that is, missionaries who adopt another working identity to enable them to continue to proselytize—has become very important in evangelism since the late twentieth century.

After Paul, however, there appears to be no formal missionary mechanism within the Christian Church. We find no names of active missionaries until the age of Constantine in the fourth century, despite the fact that Christianity was emerging as the fastest-growing religion in the Mediterranean region. As hope for the imminent End of Time and the Second Coming of Jesus declined, and as a church hierarchy developed, the initial force that drove the first missions receded. Local versions of Christianity, each with its own language and theological variation, developed throughout the empire. Once imperial patronage was established, however, Constantine and his successors would address this heterogeneity in the councils of the early Catholic Church.⁵

To understand Paul’s mission, it is necessary to understand the environment in which he operated. The Middle East, together with the rest of the empire, was a world of intellectual and religious ferment—soul searching, interest in mystery cults and other alternative religions,⁶ as well as “apocalyptic zeal, intense mysticism, and incipient violence.”⁷ With the establishment of the Roman Empire under Augustus (27 BCE–14 CE) and the subsequent institution of the cult of the emperor during the first century, religiopolitical loyalties had become more complicated. For pagans, the priests and the sacrifices to the Roman emperor, whose impact on daily life was as divine as their gods, meant the addition of more festivals to the calendar and the opportunity to construct monuments and to fund tributes. Imperial religion deified emperors, who outlawed the Eastern religions that many nevertheless continued to practice. For monotheists, refusal to participate in emperor worship meant disloyalty to the state. To the Romans, it also smacked of atheism.

Judaism was one of the religions from the East that proved attractive to many Romans in this period. Paul’s travels took him to areas of the Jewish Diaspora where Jews were one among any number of spiritual and intellectual communities spreading the good word about their particular belief systems during the early Roman Empire. It is only in the first century that we read of a general interest in Judaism’s beliefs and practices. Before then, we rarely hear about actual converts to Judaism. By the second century, however, we hear of Christians who are attracted to full-fledged Judaism, in particular women, who did not need to be circumcised.⁸ Rabbinic sources provide no evidence of an official doctrine or methodology related to proselytizing. It seems that individuals brought others into the faith, and conversion was personal and spontaneous.⁹ Roman authors write of Jews being expelled from the city of Rome because so many people from the Roman upper class were attracted to Judaism that it became somewhat of a fad to follow Jewish customs. Sympathizers who abstained from eating pork, did not work on the Sabbath, and even underwent circumcision were derided. Interested Gentiles did not deny paganism totally but rather venerated the God of the Jews and selected those Jewish rites they wished to observe. More of these “God-fearers” were to be found in areas outside of Judea, especially in Asia Minor among Jews in the communities of the Jewish Diaspora. Early Christianity at its inception was a movement within Judaism directed to Jews.¹⁰

This intellectual ferment existed in a Roman Empire fraught with internal dissension and the almost constant rebellion along its frontiers from Britain to Judea, the Caucasus, and the eastern marches. Tyrannical rulers found in the adherents to Christianity who brooked no compromise in their monotheism convenient scapegoats for imperial instability. Nero’s condemnation of Christians for setting the fire that destroyed much of the city of Rome in 64 came at a time when the emperor faced senatorial plots against his rule and had to call in troops to suppress the rebellion in Judea that would outlast his reign.

Persecutions of Christians occurred again during the reign of Domitian who faced rebellions along the Rhine and assassination. Attacks on Christians during the second century after adherence to Christianity became illegal were sporadic and were often the result of local mob violence rather than imperial decree.

After the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70, however, the split between Christianity and Judaism grew. Christians, who believed that the Messiah had come, did not participate in the Jewish rebellion against Rome (66–70), which was both political and eschatological. Despondent at the loss of Jerusalem, most Jews rejected Christian overtures and continued to await the arrival of the Messiah.

The fact that Christians were not persecuted after the Jewish rebellion under Hadrian is evidence that the Roman authorities differentiated between Jews and Christians and that the split between Christianity and Judaism had become irrevocable. The Bar Kokhba revolt in 132–135, as this rebellion is known, with its messianic overtones led to Rome’s decision to sever the ties between Jews and their homeland by renaming it Syria–Palastina. Jerusalem became a pagan cult center called Aelia Capitolina, and Jews were forbidden to enter the city except on the anniversary of the Temple’s destruction (the ninth of the Jewish month of Av), when they were permitted to sit at the last remnant of the Jewish Temple, the Western Wall (also known as the Wailing Wall) and mourn. Events of the second century also marked the dispersion of the Jews throughout the world from Central Asia to Spain, where they became one minority among many in the empires where they lived.

Economic and political instability continued as the Roman Empire’s traditional mechanisms for political control eroded. The emperors, with few troops under their direct command, relied on client peoples living on the periphery for defense of the imperial heartland, but that reliance began to break down toward the end of the second century. Despite the lengthy and stable tenures of both Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, drawn-out wars of rebellion by the tribes along the Rhine and Danube river borders and losses in the east against the Parthians severely taxed Rome’s prestige and precarious economy. The spread of Christianity across the Roman Empire in the first and second centuries was paralleled by the expansion of the empire itself. Nevertheless, in Rome the old gods still ruled, reinforced by the cult of the divinity of the emperor himself. Both Jews and Christians suffered persecution, torture, and death.

By 200, the Roman Empire had reached its greatest extent, stretching from Britain to North Africa to the Caucasus to the borders of Persia. Fifty years later, however, the empire was in crisis. Civil war over imperial succession led to short reigns by military commanders, whose border origins seemingly provided them with experience at combating the increasing tribal invasions by consortia of Goths, Franks, and Visigoths from the Ukraine to Spain who settled within the borders of the empire. Such stop-gap economic revitalization measures as imperial citizenship (212), however, led more often than not to t...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Spread of Christianity: The First Thousand Years
• 2. The Latin West in the Middle East: Pilgrimage, Crusade, and Mission
• 3. Disintegration, Revival, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation: 1450–1800
• 4. The Great Awakening of the Protestants and the Anglicans
• 5. Missionaries and European Diplomatic Competition
• 6. The Imperialist Moment: From the Congress of Berlin to World War I
• 7. Achievements and Consequences: Intended and Unintended
• 8. World War I: Nationalism, Independence, and the Fate of the Missionary Enterprise
• 9. Setting the Agenda: From Conversion to Witness and Back
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index