A History of Christianity in Asia: Volume I: Beginnings to 1500 By Samuel Hugh Moffett (review)

474 BOOK REVIEWS Asian A History of Christianity in Asia: Volume I: Beginnings to 1500. By Samuel Hugh Moffett. (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, A Division of Harper Collins Publisher. 1992. Fp. xxvi, 560. «45.00.) "The Church began in Asia. Its earliest history, its oldest centers were Asian. Asia produced the first known church building, the first New Testament translation , the first Christian king, the first Christian state, and even perhaps the first Christian poets. Asian Christians endured the greatest persecutions. They mounted global ventures in missionary expansion which the West could not match until after the thirteenth century."—So writes Professor Samuel Hugh Moffett in this new book. The history of Christianity being an unashamedly Europe-centered discipline even if a good half of the Christans live in continents other than Europe, this well-written work of Moffett is a unique gift for the world at large, particularly for the young and growing Church of Asia. Born in Korea of American parents, Moffett was a teacher in postwar nationalist as well as communist China. This Asian connection has certainly helped the author not a little, to be sensitive to the Asian perspective of studying Christianity. The author has divided the entire volume into twenty-two chapters grouped under three parts. The first part of fifteen chapters deals with the history of the church in Asia from the Apostles to Mohammed the Prophet. While the first section of three chapters deals with the first two hundred years, in the second and third sections Moffett describes the early and later Sassanid periods in Persia (225-400 a.D.; 400-651 a.D.) and in the fourth section of this first part he introduces Christianity in South Asia, viz., Indian Christianity and Christian kingdoms ofthe Arabs. In the second part, comprising three chapters, Moffett narrates vividly the spread of Christianity to China and other regions of the Asian continent from the mid-seventh century till the crusades. The third part, consisting of the last five chapters, deals with the expansion of Christianity during the "Pax Mongólica" till its near extermination under Tamerlane. Moffett's task of writing a very readable history of Asian Christianity using the latest available sources from East and West has not been easy. The work is all the more laudable when one realizes that the primary sources for the history of Christianity in Asia are very scarce and incomplete while the secondary sources are frequently contradictory in their conclusions. Nestorianism is interpreted by the author quite favorably following the latest findings in which Nestorius is rehabilitated from heresy. On the contrary, the early Nestorian monks, bishops, and patriarchs and particularly monastic leaders are described as missionaries "par excellence." They lived in a milieu that was non-Christian and often even positively anti-Christian. In fact, the Persian BOOK REVIEWS 475 persecution of Christians was much bloodier than the Roman one. Moreover, the ancient Christianity of Asia never had the luxury of a "Constantine" to create a socio-economic and political climate that would be favorable for Christianity to take deeper roots or to spread in any of the many empires or kingdoms of this vast continent. Following the Zoroastrian rulers of Persia, the Muslim rulers too stifled the Asian Church by isolating it from the masses in the socio-political and cultural fields. In the economic field, an oppressive system of taxes ruined the prosperous Christian communities. This subtle persecution of Christianity caused a steady falling away of many large groups of Christians ofNestorian, Jacobite, and Byzantine traditions to Islam. Although Moffett has not broken any new ground regarding the pre-Portuguese history of Christianity in India, he presents at length the various opinions. Unlike other non-Asian scholars, he is sympathetic to the position held by most of the Indian social scientists regarding the arrival and work of Thomas the Apostle in North and South India. The Christian history of mediaeval China both under the T'ang dynasty (635-907 A.D.) and the Mongols ( 1245- 1 368 A.D.) is quite vividly described by him. In the concluding section, Moffett sums up the various reasons for the decadence of Christianity in the different regions...