Marco Polo and Asia's Lost Christians
 |
 |
|
The Travels of Marco Polo, The Venetian
|
Marco Polo and the Discovery of the
World
|
|
by Thomas Wright [1]
|
by John Larner
|
The Nestorians
When did the first Christians come to China? 17th century? 18th century? 19th century? Actually, the first Christians came to China in the 7th century. They weren't members of the Catholic or even the Byzantine Church, but they were adherents of the Nestorian Church. The Nestorians were followers of Nestorius, a 5th century bishop of Constantinople whose views on the nature and person of Christ led to the calling of the Council of Ephesus in 431 and to Nestorianism, one of the major Christian heresies. Nestorianism, as it was understood at the time, so insisted upon the full humanity of Christ's human nature that it was believed to divide him into two persons, one human and the other divine. From the orthodox point of view, Nestorianism therefore denies the reality of the incarnation and represents Christ as a God-inspired man rather than as God-made-man.
The fact is that Nestorius repeatedly affirmed the perfect unity of the incarnate Christ, and he repudiated any suggestion of there being two persons existing side by side in his being. Nestorius can be better understood as the victim of his own intolerant personality and crudely provocative rhetoric, and as having been the loser in one of the rivalries between great episcopal sees, Constantiople and Alexandria, that were a feature of the time.
Nestorianism was crushed within the Roman Empire but survived outside its frontiers. The Christian church in Persia adopted it, largely to obtain the protection of its rulers by assuring them that its religion was not that of their enemies the Romans. With their patriarchate established at Baghdad, Nestorian churches were prominent in Syria, Asia Minor, Iraq and Persia. In the early medieval centuries, as Persian traders travelled east, they brought this form of Christianity to the flourishing cultures and kingdoms of central and east Asia, including Turkestan, Mongolia and China.
And yet Western Europe remained ignorant of these eastern Christians -- Nestorians
and Jacobites -- who, according
to Jacques de Vitry, Bishop of Tyre, "exceeded the numbers of Latins and
Greeks taken together, and within the Muslim lands, apart from Egypt and Syria,
far exceeded the number of Mohammedan believers.[2]
Europe was cut off from eastern Asia by mountains, deserts, fierce tribes and
anti-Christian Muslims.
However, another Asian people was about to provide Europe with a window on Eastern Asia -- the Mongols.
[1] The Travels of Marco Polo, the Venetian is a free ebook and can be downloaded by clicking here.
[2] A.-D. von den Brincken, "Le Nestorianisme vu par l'Occident" in 1274: Année Charnière: Mutations et Continuités (Paris, 1977), p.76.
|
Page 1 -- The Nestorians
|
www.heritagemadison.org
Webmaster - Dan Nelson
Copyright © 2007 Heritage Congregational Church All Rights Reserved