Spread of Christianity eastward

Accustomed to the colorful maps of Paul's missionary journeys printed in study Bibles, we are inclined to think that the initial expansion took place in the Mediterranean world. But in the vast region east of Jerusalem—Syria, Jordan, and Iraq, where Aramaic was the lingua franca—the majority of people had become Christian by the seventh century. The Christian gospel was carried even farther east to ancient Persia, and from there it traveled along the Silk Road into Central Asia: Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan. At some point during the first six centuries it reached the western shore of India and even China. In the seventh century, the global center of Christianity lay not in Europe but to the east of Jerusalem.

Though the peoples of this vast area spoke many languages and had different customs, through Christianity they were linked together in the confession of the creed of Nicaea. They baptized their infants in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, offered the sacrifice of the Eucharist in their churches, were governed by bishops, revered the lives of ascetic men and women living in monastic communities, and had in common a holy book.

Archaeologists have uncovered fragments of ancient Christian texts that make the point powerfully. At both Antrim in Northern Ireland and in Panjikent, near Samarkand, in present-day Uzbekistan, copybooks were found from about the year 700 (wax on wood in Ireland and potsherds in Asia), each containing verses from the Psalms. In Ireland, the schoolboy whose language was Irish had written the psalm verses in Latin, and in Panjikent, the boy whose language was Soghdian had written his lesson in Syriac.

A number of Catholic monks were sent on diplomatic missions to the Great Khan at Karakorum, beginning in the mid-thirteenth century and continuing for a century after that. John of Plano Carpini, a Franciscan, arrived in 1247. Another Franciscan, William of Rubruck reached the Mongol capital in 1253. The famous traveler Marco Polo reached the Mongol capital of Khanbaliq (modern-day Beijing) in 1275, encountering many Nestorians on his way from the Middle East. He speaks of both Nestorian and Jacobite Christians amongst the Kurds and mentions Nestorians living further east in a number of Silk Road cities. In Samarkand, he describes the building of a great church dedicated to John the Baptist which was erected to celebrate the conversion of the hatayid khan to Christianity. Nestorians are also mentioned in Kashgar, Yarkand, Kara Khoja (in "Uighuristan" - this may be modern-day Urumchi) and Ghinghintalas (possibly modern-day Barkul), all in Chinese Turkestan today. In China proper, Polo tells us of Christians in Shachau, Kanchou, Erguiul (possibly Yunchang), Sinju and Kalachan (possibly Ningxia), cities in the Gansu Corridor, as well as in Tenduc (modern-day Inner Mongolia), Khanbaliq, Yachi (in Yunnan province, near Burma), Ho-kien-fu, Pao-ying, Chinkiang and Kinsai (modern-day Hangzhou). He also describes the Christians in Malabar and Quilon, in India, as well as those living on Male Island (the Maldives) and Socotra, all of them subject to the Nestorian patriarch in Baghdad. 

Since the Nestorians were prohibited from evangelizing in the areas ruled by the Muslims, they were once again forced to look eastward in order to find those with whom they might share the gospel. Although there were Nestorian bishops or metropolitans in Damascus, Alexandria, Tarsus, and Jerusalem during this time, most of the new evangelistic efforts were in areas not yet Muslim. Already, at the time of the Arab invasion, there were at least two archbishops (possibly in Samarkand and Kashgar, although the exact locations are not known) and more than twenty bishops located beyond the Oxus River. Under the patriarch Yeshuyab II (628-643), at the same time that a new metropolitanate was being created for India, the Nestorians also reached China and appointed a metropolitan for that country, in addition to several bishops. The accomplishments of Nestorian Christianity in China are commemorated on the Nestorian monument, erected in 781 and unearthed in 1625 by Jesuit missionaries in Hsi-an-fu (modern-day Xi'an). The inscription in Chinese and Syriac records the spread of Nestorian Christianity during the T'ang dynasty.

Students of church history are very familiar with the spread of Christianity westward from Jerusalem. Indeed, most church history is concerned almost exclusively with the movement of the gospel from Palestine to the Greco-Roman world and thence to the rest of Europe (and many centuries later, to the New World). However, it is not common knowledge that the message of Christ also moved eastward at a very early date and indeed there was a thriving church in Asia until the late Middle Ages, long before Catholic (and later, Protestant) missionaries arrived from the West.