Wilhelm Baum and Dietmar W. Winkler. The Church of the East: A Concise History. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, xii + 204 pp; hardcover. $130.
Joel
Walker
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
George A. Kiraz
James E. Walters
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Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute
2008
Vol. 11, No. 2
For this publication, a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
license has been granted by the author(s), who retain full
copyright.
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/article/hv11n2prwalker
Joel Walker
Wilhelm Baum and Dietmar W. Winkler. The Church of the East: A Concise History. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003, xii + 204 pp; hardcover. $130.
https://hugoye.bethmardutho.org/pdf/vol11/HV11N2PRWalker.pdf
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies
Beth Mardutho: The Syriac Institute,
vol 11
issue 2
Hugoye: Journal of Syriac Studies is an electronic journal dedicated to the study
of the Syriac tradition, published semi-annually (in January and July) by Beth
Mardutho: The Syriac Institute. Published since 1998, Hugoye seeks to offer the
best scholarship available in the field of Syriac studies.
Syriac Studies
Church of the East
Historiography
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[1] How does
one write a "concise" account of a Church, whose history spans
three continents and seventeen centuries? In this learned
little survey, Austrian scholars Wilhelm Baum and Dietmar
Winkler make a valiant effort to provide an introductory
overview to the entire history of the Church of the East. The
book is an unrevised English translation of its German original
published in 2000.
Wilhelm Baum and Dietmar Winkler, Die
Apostolische Kirche des Ostens: Geschichte der sogenannten
Nestorianer (Klagenfurt, Austria: Verlag Kitab, 2000).
Winkler is credited with authorship of chapters 1 (on the
origins of the Church of the East) and 5 (its modern history),
while Baum composed the central three chapters on the Church's
history under Islamic rule.
As such, it fills a conspicuous hole in the
English-language historiography, which has not seen a
monograph-length survey of the Church of the East since
1929.
W. A. Wigram, The Assyrians and their
Neighbours (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1929; reprint:
Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2002). The Church of the East
does, however, receive extensive coverage in general surveys of
Christianity in pre-modern Asia. See esp. Ian Gillman and
Hans-Joachim Klimkeit, Christians in Asia before 1500
(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1999).
The authors composed "with a non-specialist
audience in mind"—hence, the absence of footnotes and
diacritical marks in transliteration. The results are mixed,
though the book offers much of interest for advanced students
and serious general readers.
[2] After a
sensible introduction to the thorny issue of how to refer to
the Church of the East—also known as the Nestorian, the
East Syriac, or the Assyrian Church—chapter one explores
the origins of Christianity in Iraq and the institutional
development of Christianity in the Sasanian Empire (224-642).
Winkler (sole author of this section) is perceptive on the
development of the East-Syrian patriarchate and theology. The
chapter concludes with his spirited defense of the orthodoxy of
the East-Syrian creed, which was presented to the Sasanian
court in 612 and remains valid for the "entire" Church of the
East today.
[3] Chapters
two and three survey the Church of the East's history under
Arab and then Mongol rule, emphasizing its international and
multi-ethnic character extending across large stretches of
Asia. Baum briefly describes the patriarchate of Ishoyabh III
(580-658) and the East-Syrian monastic movement, which led to
the foundation of more than one hundred forty monasteries whose
locations have been determined in Mesopotamia, western Iran,
and the Persian Gulf. Baum also highlights the well-documented
role of East-Syrian doctors and philosophers in the
intellectual accomplishments of the Abbasid translation
movement. But his chief interest—and arguably the most
important contribution of this book—lies in the story of
the Church of East's vigorous expansion into Central Asia,
China, and southern India. Baum devotes particular attention to
the conditions that facilitated the translation of Syriac
Christian texts into Sogdian, Uighur, and Chinese. In doing so,
he offers valuable context for understanding the famous
bilingual Chinese and Syriac stele erected at Xi'an in northern
China in 781 and dedicated to a priest from Balkh
(Afghanistan). A Buddhist document of the same decade
describes, for instance, how an Indian scholar translated texts
from Uighur with the help of a "Persian" Christian monk named
King-tsing (Adam), who was already renowned for his
translations into Chinese.
[4] Baum's
account juxtaposes archaeological evidence from across Asia,
introducing documents preserved in a wide array of languages
and formats. A page from the ninth or tenth-century Sogdian
lectionary found at Bulayiq, north of the Turfan oasis in
northwestern China, belongs to the detritus of the trilingual
monastic library excavated there by the German Theodor Bartus
in 1904. Hundreds of Syriac fragments from the same excavation
still await publication more than a century later. Baum
occasionally taps into documentary sources in non-Christian
languages. In a series of copper plates inscribed in Tamil, a
regional king of ninth-century south India guarantees the
privileges of the Christian merchants of Kerala. But the
relationship between these documents and the subsequent
development of Malayalam-speaking Christianity in the same
region remains frustratingly obscure. The contours of the
Church become a bit clearer in the Mongol period, where Baum's
narrative leads the reader through whole clusters of new
literary and documentary sources in Syriac, Armenian, Latin,
Persian, and Chinese. The wealth of information crammed into
these chapters can be disorienting, but it also serves to
underscore the need for new in-depth studies of particular
segments in the pre-modern religious history of Asia.
[5] The
book's fourth chapter investigates the growing turmoil of
East-Syrian communities under Ottoman rule, as papal emissaries
negotiated with the two (and often three) patriarchates of the
Church of the East based in northern Mesopotamia. The tangled
ecclesiastical history of this period unfolds against the
backdrop of the competing patriarchal sees at Diyarbakir, the
monastery of Rabban Hormizd near Nineveh, and in the highlands
of Kochanes on the upper reaches of the Great Zab River. The
chapter has much less to say about the social and cultural
history of the Church under Ottoman rule. The German original
arrived too late to take advantage of David Wilmshurst's
massive catalogue of East-Syrian colophons, the majority of
them dating to the Ottoman period.
David Wilmshurst, The Ecclesiastical
Organization of the Church of the East, 1318-1913. CSCO
582; Subsidia 104 (Louvain: Peeters, 2004).
The recent work of Heleen
Murre-van den Berg brilliantly illustrates how such colophons
can be used to write the social history of this period.
Heleen Murre-van den Berg, "Generous Women in the
Church of the East between 1550 and 1850." (January, 2004): 1-57.
One hopes
that future surveys will also be able to integrate the evidence
of later Aramaic literature by writers such as the poet Israel
of Alqos (†1632).
[6] The
latter half of chapter four and chapter five survey the
multi-faceted relations between the Christians of northern
Mesopotamia and various scholars, diplomats, and missionaries
from Europe, Russia, and America. Baum's account offers a
refreshingly European perspective on these contacts. His list
of characters includes: Anna Hafner Forneris, an Austrian who
traveled from Tbilisi to Tabriz in 1830 and left a scandalized
description of a drunken Eucharist among the "mountain
Nestorians;" the great Orientalist Edward Sachau, who
transported more than 250 Syriac manuscripts back to Berlin in
1880; and the popular novelist Karl May (d. 1912), who provided
generations of German readers with an image of the region's
Christians as a noble but endangered people. In Durch das
wilde Kurdistan, published in 1892, May describes the
region's Christians as "the remnants of the once so powerful
Assyrian people, [who] see the sword of the Turks and the
dagger of the Kurds hanging forever over them and have endured
in more recent times atrocities which would make your hair
stand on end" (131). Winkler's account of the fate of those
"Nestorians" before, during, and in the wake of the First World
War offers a sobering narrative of persecution, combat, flight,
starvation, and broken diplomatic promises.
On these same themes, see now John Joseph's The
Modern Assyrians of the Middle East: Encounters with Western
Christian missions, archaeologists, and colonial powers
(Leiden, Boston, and Cologne: Brill, 2000), 106-73.
The last portion of
chapter five traces the history of the Church of the East to
the end of the twentieth century, sketching the formation of
the North American and European Diaspora and the growth of
ecumenical dialogue. Chapter six gives a very brief overview of
the Church of the East's literature preserved in Syriac and
other languages.
[7] In sum,
Baum and Winkler's survey constitutes a welcome addition to the
growing literature on Christianity in pre-modern Asia. The text
is probably too dense with names and details to be effective
for the "non-specialist" readers named as its target audience.
It is also prohibitively expensive. But research libraries
should certainly include the title on their shelves. Sixteen
illustrations and two maps complement and enhance the text. The
sixteen-page bibliography, organized by chapter, provides a
valuable guide to further reading and is particularly strong on
German-language scholarship that is often overlooked in North
American publications. Few bibliographies are without
blemishes, but the book's hefty price tag should have paid for
better copy-editing.
I list a few examples. The bibliographic citation
for Samuel Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia:
Volume I: Beginnings to 1500 (Mary Knoll, NY: Orbis Books,
1998) has mistakes in author's name, the book's title, and its
publication information. E. A. W. Budge translated rather than
edited The Monks of Kublai Khan (London: Religious
Tract Society, 1928), although the publication includes a
facsimile of the Syriac manuscript. Jean-Maurice Fiey attacked
the credibility of the Chronique d'Arbèles, and
the volume and pagination for The Chronicle of
Séert and several other primary texts are
incomplete. These and other mistakes could be easily corrected
if there is a second edition.
_______
Notes