Recovering Church History: Exile from Babylon
The Iraqi Christian community, now nearly gone, was the church’s
center for a millennium.
Philip Jenkins | posted 12/31/2008
Across much of the Middle East, the ancient Christian story seems to
be coming to a bloody end almost before our eyes. The most dramatic
catastrophe in recent years has been that of Iraq’s Christians, who
represented 5-6 percent of Iraq’s population in 1970. That number is
now below 1 percent, and shrinking fast in the face of persecution and
ethnic/religious cleansing.
Western Christians watch this story in horror, but few claim detailed
knowledge of the situation, or can easily recognize the Iraqi churches
we read of in the news. Are they perhaps the survivors of some
Victorian missionary enterprise? we wonder.
Actually, understanding the history of Iraq’s churches should make us
still more keenly aware of the tragedy we see unfolding. Not only are
these churches – Chaldean, Assyrian, Orthodox – truly ancient, they
are survivals from the earliest history of the church. For centuries
indeed, the land long known as Mesopotamia had a solid claim to rank
as the center of the church and an astonishing record of missions and
evangelism. What we see today in Iraq isnot just the death of a
church, but also the end of one of the most awe-inspiring phases of
Christian history.The Church Goes Back to Ur Mesopotamia was so vital
to early Christians because it was firmly part of the ancient
civilized world, connected to the Mediterranean by flourishing trade
routes, while at the same time, it usually lay beyond the Roman
Empire’s political power.
When they faced persecution in Syria or Palestine, early Christians
tended to move east, where they joined the ancient Jewish communities
based in Babylon. These churches were rooted in the oldest traditions
of the apostolic church. Throughout their history, they used Syriac,
which is close to Jesus’ language of Aramaic, and they followed
Yeshua, not Jesus.
When the Roman Empire became Christian, Mesopotamia became the main
refuge for those theological currents that the empire now labeled
heretical: the Monophysites or Jacobites, and the
Nestorians. Ultimately, most of the Christians of modern Iraq look to
one of these movements as their spiritual ancestor.
Once outside Roman oversight, Christian leaders were free to establish
their own churches. The main Christian church in the Persian Empire
was based in the twin cities of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the successor to
ancient Babylon and the most populous city in the world at that
time. This church followed the teachings of Nestorius after 431. In
498, its head, the Katholikos, took the title of Patriarch of Babylon,
the Patriarch of the East. When Muslims in their turn established
their own empire, overthrowing the Persians, the Katholikos moved his
capital to Baghdad.
Syriac-speaking Christianity found a stronghold in Mesopotamia, around
the northern reaches of the rivers Euphrates and Tigris. Today, the
older place names have vanished and bear no relationship to modern
state divisions; in terms of modern nations, we are speaking of the
area where modern Iraq, Turkey, and Syria come together, where
activists now struggle to create a new Kurdistan. The region includes
many names that are often in the news as centers of political violence
and instability. For centuries, the major churches here were as famous
as any in Christian Europe, although their story is now quite
forgotten in the West.
>From the 4th century through the 14th, Iraq had many centers of
Christian scholarship and devotion. Apart from Baghdad itself, the
Church of the East had metropolitans at Basra, Kirkuk, and
Erbil. Jacobite leaders often made their home in Tikrit, which served
as the seat of the Maphrianus (Consecrator), head of the Jacobite
church throughout the East. Tikrit in modern times gained notoriety as
the home of Saddam Hussein and his Sunni Muslim al-Tikriti clan.
Mosul, too, had its stellar Christian past. And surrounding the cities
were hundreds of monasteries that were certainly equal to anything in,
say, contemporary Ireland in terms of scholarly tradition.
These Mesopotamian monasteries were also the base camps for one of the
greatest missionary enterprises in Christian history. Especially
between the 7th and 9th centuries, the Church of the East was
establishing bishoprics and metropolitans across Asia – through
Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, into Tibet and Kyrgyzstan, and as far as
India and China.Scapegoats for Global Cooling Looking at the world in
850 or so, few observers would have doubted that the Christian future
lay in the Middle East and Asia, rather than in the barbarian-ravaged
lands of Western Europe.
Insofar as they know the story of Christianity in the East, Westerners
generally assume that those churches must have shriveled quite soon
after the rise of Islam during the 7th and 8th centuries. Actually,
the decline was much slower; Iraq’s churches and monasteries were
still booming well into the 12th and 13th centuries.
What effectively finished them off were the Mongol invasions and their
aftermath, which devastated most of Central Asia and the Middle East
from the 1220s onwards. Also, in the late-13th century, the world
entered a terrifying era of global cooling, which severely cut food
supplies and contributed to mass famine.
Meanwhile, the collapse of trade and commerce crippled cities, leaving
the world much poorer and more vulnerable. A hungry and desperate
society looked for scapegoats. Europe’s Christians turned on Jews,
killing and expelling hundreds of thousands; in Mesopotamia and
elsewhere, Muslims inflicted a similar fate upon their Christian
neighbors.
Christian communities were uprooted or wiped out across the Middle
East, and ceased to exist in most of Central Asia. Churches suffered
mass closure or destruction, including at such ancient centers as
Erbil, Mosul, and Baghdad.
Bishops and clergy were tortured and imprisoned.
Christianity survived, but was confined to poorer and more remote
regions.
The Patriarchs of "Babylon" now literally headed for the hills: in
later centuries, patriarchs made their home at the Rabban Hormizd
monastery, in the mountains near Mosul. Iraq’s shining Christian
millennium had ended.
The final phase of the Mesopotamian churches began with the First
World War, when the Muslim Ottoman Empire began slaughtering
Christians across its territory. Among others, they targeted the
Assyrians – that is, thelast remnants of the Nestorian church that had
once carried the faith of Yeshua to the Pacific Ocean.
(The Nestorians had split into the Chaldeans, who accepted papal
authority, and the Assyrian church, which retained its
independence. The ancient Jacobites, meanwhile, became known as Syrian
Orthodox.) Matters scarcely improved under the successor states
established on the ruins of Ottoman rule. In 1933, Muslim forces in
the new nation of Iraq launched a deadly assault on the surviving
communities of the Assyrian peoples.
Government-sponsored militias cleansed much of the far north of Iraq
of its Assyrian population, killing thousands and eliminating dozens
of villages.
So shocking were the purges that they demanded new legal
vocabulary. Some months afterwards, Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael
Lemkin used the cases of the Assyrians, and the Christian Armenians
before them, to argue for a new legal category of Crimes of Barbarity:
"acts of extermination directed against the ethnic, religious, or
social collectivities whatever the motive (political, religious,
etc.)." A great humanitarian, Lemkin developed this theme over the
following years, and in 1943, he coined a new word for this atrocious
behavior, namely genocide. The modern concept of genocide as a
uniquely horrible act demanding international sanctions has its roots
in the thoroughly successful movements to eradicate Middle Eastern
Christians.Almost Gone Christians did fairly well under the secular
and nationalist rule of the Ba’ath Party, which rejected Muslim
domination. In fact, Christians had originally helped found the
Ba’ath, and long remained among its greatest supporters.
Saddam’s foreign minister and deputy Tariq Aziz was by origin a member
of the Chaldean church, and bore the purely Christian name of Mikhail
Yuhanna, "Michael John." Reportedly, 20 percent of Iraq’s teachers, as
well as manyof its doctors and engineers, were Christian then.
But international events took their toll. The nation’s economy was
devastated by two wars, against Iran in the 1980s and against the
U.S.-led Coalition in 1990-91, and the painful international sanctions
that followed. These events provoked the exodus of everyone who could
leave easily, which usually meant those professional groups, among
whom Christians were well represented.
The second invasion of 2003 proved the final straw by unleashing
Muslim militancy, both Sunni and Shi’ite, while removing any central
policing authority.
In the ensuing anarchy, Christians became primary targets of mobs and
militias. Since that point, the story of Iraq’s Christianity has been
a catalog of persecution and martyrdom. Just between 2003 and 2007,
two-thirds of Iraq’s remaining Christians left the country, and the
population will certainly shrink further in coming years, probably to
a vanishing point.
What we are seeing then is the death of one of the world’s greatest
Christian enterprises. Certainly, its glory days were far behind it.
Recall what William Wordsworth wrote when the Republic of Venice was
snuffed out after centuries of dominating the Mediterranean world:
And what if she had seen those glories fade,
Those titles vanish, and that strength decay?
Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid
When her long life hath reach’d its final day:
Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade
Of that which once was great is pass’d away.
How could we mourn dying churches less than dead republics? Philip
Jenkins is the author of The Lost History of Christianity: The
Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and
Asia – and How It Died
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(San Francisco: HarperOne, 2008)
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