World Christianity: Contours of an Approach

Over the past years, I have been teaching an introductory course on Christian history. During the weekly seminars the students read a selection of primary sources. One of the seminar sessions is dedicated to the ‘Church of the East’, during which we do a parallel reading of the text of the Nestorian monument, commemorating the 150th anniversary of the ‘luminous religion’ in China (781) and the dialogue between the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdī and Nestorian Patriarch Timothy I in Baghdad (c. 780). Both materials originate from the same period and church tradition, but where the Nestorian monument uses Buddhist and Daoist notions to express Christianity, the Baghdadi dialogue engages Islam as its main conversation partner (Horne 1917: 381–392; Ji 2007: 24–81; Mingana 2009). Students are often astonished to discover that these texts, which are so dissimilar in genre, locality, and context, are connected through the person of Timothy I, who, while resident in Baghdad, was also the patriarch of the Nestorian churches in China when the monument was erected. Philip Jenkins calls him “arguably the most significant Christian spiritual leader of his day, much more influential than the Western pope, in Rome” (Jenkins 2008: 6). Timothy’s patriarchate was vast, with bishops in present-day Syria, Armenia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, India, and China (Irvin and Sunquist 2001: 284–287). Yet however impressive the spatial extent of Timothy’s ecclesial responsibilities, in the class we remind ourselves that there was more to the Christian story in the latter decades of the eighth century than the Church of the East. We recall, for example, that around the same time, somewhat further to the west, Empress Irene was taking measures to end the first period of Byzantine iconoclasm, itself a side-effect of the advance of Islam (Crone 2017: 361–397). Or that even further west on the Iberian Peninsula a member of the Umayyad dynasty had established the emirate of Cordoba and was commissioning the construction of the illustrious Mezquita de Cordoba on the site of a former Visigoth church (Hillenbrand 1994:113–114). Towards the north, Charlemagne was on the warpath, simultaneously submitting and Christianizing neighbouring Saxons and Lombards to realize his ambition to