The church of the East
Nestorian Christianity spreads across Asia
While the Western church is consolidating under Rome and the Eastern church is consolidating under Constantinople, a third Christianity is quietly doing something neither of them is doing: going east.
The Church of the East — the tradition condemned at Ephesus in 431 AD as Nestorian — has its center in Persia, outside the Roman Empire entirely. It operates under Persian and later Arab rule, persecuted and patronized by turns, but never destroyed.
And it sends missionaries.
They follow the Silk Road east. By the sixth century there are Christian communities in Sogdia — modern Uzbekistan. By the seventh century Christianity reaches China. In 635 AD, the monk Alopen arrives in the Tang Dynasty capital of Chang'an and is received by the emperor Taizong, who finds Christianity interesting and allows its propagation.
The Nestorian Stele — a limestone monument discovered in China in 1625 — records in both Chinese and Syriac the history of the Tang Dynasty church. It describes Christian theology in Chinese philosophical language, making it intelligible to a culture that had never heard of Jerusalem or Rome.
By the ninth century, the Church of the East may have had more members than the Roman Catholic church — spread across Persia, Arabia, India, Central Asia, and China.
Then the Mongol conquests devastate it in the thirteenth century. By the fourteenth, it is a remnant.
For five centuries, there was a Christianity that reached China. Most Western Christians have never heard of it.
“The luminous religion was introduced into our Tang Empire. Scriptures were translated and monasteries built. The dead were given life; souls were illumined.”
— The Nestorian Stele, Chang'an, China, 781 AD
“I tell you that many will come from the east and the west, and will sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the Kingdom of Heaven,”
The Church of the East reached China in 635 AD. Most Western Christians — even serious students of church history — have never heard this.
The gospel is not a Western religion that spread east. It began in the Middle East, spread east before it spread west, and at its medieval peak had communities from Ireland to Beijing.
The provincialism that limits our understanding of church history to Western Europe is not just an intellectual failure. It is a theological one — a failure to see the full scope of what God was doing.
The table at which Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob sit has people coming from every direction. The Christianity you know is one tributary of a much larger river.
What would it change about your faith to know that it is genuinely global — not because of Western missions but because it has always been moving in every direction at once?