This careful and scholarly study assembles and discusses the available evidence for the ecllesiastical organisation of the Church of the East (the so-called 'Nestorian' church) in the Middle East between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries. The author has built on the work of the late J.M. Fiey, but has covered a wider geographical area and used a much wider range of sources. Besides drawing on the memoirs of European and American missionaries and other literary sources, the author has consulted a large number of manuscript catalogues, many of which are only accessible in Arabic sources, and has analysed the evidence of more than 2.500 East Syrian manuscript colophons to establish the dioceses of the Church of the East at different periods, to identify its ecclesiastical elites (patriarchs, bishops, priests, deacons and scribes), and to analyse the rivalry between the church's traditionalist and Catholic wings after the schism of 1552. The study contains a number of detailed maps, which localise hundreds of East Syrian villages in Kurdistan, and will be an indispensable reference tool for scholars of the Church of the East.

This work represents the current and most relevant content on the studies of how Christianity has fared in the ancient home of its founder and birth. Much has been written about Christianity and how it has survived since its migration out of its homeland but this comprehensive reference work reassesses the geographic and demographic impact of the dramatic changes in this perennially combustible world region. The Rowman & Littlefield Handbook of Christianity in the Middle East also spans the historical, socio-political and contemporary settings of the region and importantly describes the interactions that Christianity has had with other major/minor religions in the region.

This book tells a story of serendipity. Two Christian monks left China about 1274, headed to Jerusalem. Travelling on an itinerary similar to that Marco Polo had taken, they reached Iran, ruled by a Mongol dynasty, the Ilkhans. There, what they never had expected happened: one of them, Mark by name, was elected Patriarch of the Church of the East (with the name Yahballaha), while the other, Rabban Sauma, was sent as ambassador to the pope and the courts of France and England by the Mongol Ilkhan Arghun. From Rabban Sauma's report of his embassy, and the two monk's memories of their journey from China to Mesopotamia, an anonymous author compiled a biography of Sauma and Mark. He interspersed their report and memories with a narrative about "the occurrences of their time - what happened to them, through them or because of them, relating everything just as it happened". The result was a chronicle entitled "History of Mar Yahballaha and Rabban Sauma", a rich and lively testimony of a time of unprecedented interconnectedness in the history of Eurasia at the epoch of the Mongol Empire.

Focusing on the situation of both Muslim and non-Muslim religious minorities in the Middle East, this volume offers an analysis of various strategies of resilience and accommodation from a historical as well a contemporary perspective.

Christian Thought in the Medieval Islamicate World: ʿAbdīshōʿ of Nisibis and the Apologetic Tradition is the first monograph-length study and intellectual biography of ʿAbdīshōʿ of Nisibis (d. 1318), bishop and polymath of the Church of the East. Focusing on his works of apologetic theology, it examines the intellectual strategies he employs to justify Christianity against Muslim (and to a lesser extent Jewish) criticisms. Better known to scholars of Syriac literature as a poet, jurist, and cataloguer, ʿAbdīshōʿ wrote a considerable number of works in the Arabic language, many of which have only recently come to light. He flourished at a time when Syriac Christian writers were becoming increasingly indebted to Islamic models of intellectual production. Yet many of his writings were composed during mounting religious tensions following the official conversion of the Ilkhanate to Islam in 1295. In the midst of these challenges, ʿAbdīshōʿ negotiates a centuries-long tradition of Syriac and Arabic apologetics to remind his readers of the verity of the Christian faith. His engagement with this tradition reveals how anti-Muslim apologetics had long shaped the articulation of Christian identity in the Middle East since the emergence of Islam. Through a selective process of encyclopaedism and systematisation, ʿAbdīshōʿ navigates a vast corpus of Syriac and Arabic apologetics to create a synthesis and theological canon that remains authoritative to this day.

This volume is a collection of ten articles published between 2009 and 2016 by Mark Dickens on the Assyrian Church of the East in Central Asia, along with a new article on Mar Yahbalaha III, the only Turkic patriarch of the Assyrian Church of the East. Most articles deal with the textual evidence for Syriac Christianity in Central Asia, including six on Christian manuscript fragments from Turfan (China) and two on gravestone inscriptions from Semirechye (Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan). As the volume title indicates, these articles remind us of the centuries-long presence of the Assyrian Church of the East at the centre of the Asian continent, now all but forgotten due to the general scarcity of sources from which this history can be reconstructed.

The purpose of this volume is to identify and analyze the mechanisms and processes through which concepts and institutions of transcultural phenomena gain and are given momentum. Applied to a range of cases, including examples drawn from ancient Greece and modern India, the early modern Portuguese presence in China and politics of elite-mass dynamics in the People’s Republic of China, the book provides a template for the study of transcultural dynamics over time. Besides the epochal range, the papers in this volume illustrate the thematic diversity assembled under the umbrella of the Heidelberg Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context.” Drawing from both the humanities and social sciences, stretching across several world areas and centuries, the book is an interdisciplinary work, aptly reflected in the collaboration of its editors: a historian and political scientist.

An examination of groups and individuals in Rome who were not Roman Catholic, or not born so. It demonstrates how other religions had a lasting impact on early modern Catholic institutions in Rome.

This book provides a modern historical study of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Iraq from 2003 to 2013, against a background analysis of the origins and ecclesiological development of the Chaldean community from the sixteenth century onwards. The book offers an insight into the formation of Chaldean ecclesiological identity and organisation in the context of the Chaldeans as a community originating from the ecclesial traditions of the Church of the East and as an Eastern Catholic Church in union with the Holy See. The book argues for the gradual and consistent development of a Chaldean identity grounded and incarnated in the Mesopotamian-Iraqi environment, yet open to engaging with cultures throughout the Middle East and West Asia and, especially since 2003, to Europe, North America and Australasia. It also examines the effects of religious and administrative policies of the governors of Mesopotamia-Iraq on the Chaldeans, from their formation in the sixteenth century until the installation of the new Chaldean patriarch, Louis Raphael I Sako, in March 2013. Furthermore, the book provides a unique analysis of the history of Iraq, by placing the Chaldeans fully into that narrative for the first time. Providing a thorough overview of the history of the Chaldeans and an in-depth assessment of how the 2003 invasion has affected them, this book will be a key resource for students and scholars of Middle East Studies, Modern History, History of Christianity, as well as for anyone seeking to understand the modern status of Christians in Iraq and the wider Middle East.

Published in the Series Encyclopedia of Indian Religions, this volume is devoted to Christianity in India, where it has had a long presence, going back to the time of the apostles of Jesus Christ. Divided into two parts, this volume focuses on the history, origin, organizations and local engagements, belief system, worship practices, Rites, Rituals, Christian life, Contributions, Spirituality and a few of the main doctrinal items. The Second Part covers the doctrinal and theological arena. It examines the earlier phase of the history of Christianity starting with the traditional belief of the arrival of St. Thomas in AD 52, moving to the periods of its association with the Chaldean church, the Portuguese, the Dutch, English and so on. This volume highlights the missionary activities of persons like St. Francis Xavier, the creative contributions made to the inter-religious dialogue by such people as Roberto de Nobili (1577-1656) and Swami Abhishiktananda (1910-1973), the linguistic and educational contributions of some of the pioneers like the German Jesuit Johanne Ernst Hanxleden (known as Arnos Padiri) (1681-1732), Herman Gundert (1814-1893), St. Elias Kuriakos Chavara (1805-1871), and, a fortiori, the enormous contributions in the healthcare area throughout the country. Caring for and serving the socio-economically marginalized ones, the peripheralized people formed an integral part of the Christian activity In India, as it is done even today. This is highlighted very much in the volume. It, further, explores the contact India had with European Christianity, showing that European Christianity proved to have wider influence in the Norther part of India, unlike India’s early episodic encounters with Palestinian and Persian forms of Christianity, which had deep influence in the Southern part of India. The volume also highlights the inner struggle among the followers resulting even in its division originating at the Synod of Diamper in 1599 manifesting, by and large, the Church-state ‘love and hate’ relationships. In fine, in spite of the drawbacks of putting the herculean task of two thousand years of history in eight hundred pages or so, this volume gives a rather comprehensive view of Christianity in India especially to those who are unfamiliar with its life and dynamics in the Indian context. The wide range of photographs, especially of the churches revealing the architectural beauty and multiplicity along with the ensample of art and paintings and pilgrimage centers adds to the enrichment of the volume.