Welcome to Communion

Welcome to Communio Sanctorum, the history of the Christian Church.

This 84th episode of Communio Sanctorum is titled Lost and is a brief review of the Church in the East.

I encourage you to go back and listen again to episode 72, meanwhile Church in the East. I encourage you to go back and listen again to

episode 72, meanwhile back in the East, which conveyed a lot of detail about the Eastern

Church and how it fared under the Mongols and Muslim expansion in the Middle Ages. Until that time,

Christianity was widespread across a good part of the Middle East, Mesopotamia,

Persia, and Central Asia, reaching all the way to China. The reaction of Muslim rulers to the

insipient Mongol affiliation with Christianity meant a systematic persecution of believers in

Muslim lands, especially in Egypt, where Christians were regarded as a

kind of fifth column. Then, when the Mongols embraced Islam, entire regions of Christians were

eradicated. Still, even with these deprivations, Christianity continued to live on in vast portions

across the east. Let me insert a verbal footnote at this point.

Much of what follows comes from the work of Philip Jenkins, whose book The Lost History of

Christianity is a stellar review of the Church of the East. I hardly recommend it to all of you

hardcore history fans. Consider this. The news recently reported the attacks by ISIS on Assyrian Christians in northern Iraq.

This is really a reprise of 1933, when Muslim forces in the new nation of Iraq launched

assaults on Nestorian and Assyrians in what had once been the

Christian heartland of northern Mesopotamia. But now, government-sponsored militias

cleanse most of the area of its Assyrian population, killing thousands and eliminating dozens

of villages. Although the atrocities weren't new, the arrival of modern media

meant that they reached the attention of the world, raising demands for Western intervention.

...