The-Lost-History-Of-Christianity, Author, John Philip Jenkins. File size, 3.6 MB. Language, English. File format, PDF. Category, History.

By Philip Jenkins HarperOne (2008) 315 pages, $26.95 In the old walled city of Famagusta in Cyprus, a curious building testifies to the mixed heritage of the island's peoples. Towering over what is now a predominantly Turkish-Cypriot-inhabited city is a gothic edifice once known as St. Nicholas Cathedral, built by the Crusaders some seven centuries ago. On the north side of the church stands a minaret, built after the Turkish conquest of the island in 1571, marking the church's subsequent transformation into the Lala Mustafa Pasha Mosque. A once largely Christian population has been replaced by a largely Muslim one—a situation repeated elsewhere throughout the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. Given my own paternal roots in the island, I was drawn to Philip Jenkins's latest book,, and especially its subtitle, 'The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died.'

In his celebrated earlier work, (Oxford University Press, 2002), he chronicled the dramatic shift in recent decades of Christianity's center of gravity from Europe and the West to the 'Global South' (Africa, Asia, and Latin America). As he told this story, he dropped some tantalizing hints that the historical demographics of Christianity might not have been what most people think they were. Jenkins now fleshes out those hints in this new volume. Most of his readers will be familiar with the two worlds of Latin and Greek Christianity, centered in Rome and Constantinople respectively. Few will be aware of the territorially vast Christian world east of the Roman Empire extending from the Syriac-speaking Near East to the borders of China or to the south in Egypt and Ethiopia. These Christians were more than just a few 'schismatics' peripheral to the 'mainstream' of Christianity. The numbers were large, at times exceeding those of the Latin West under papal jurisdiction, and therefore constituted another Christian 'mainstream'—one closer than the others to the Semitic cultural world of the New Testament. Gta Underground Game Setup Free Download For Pc.

To illustrate the size of this 'Third Christian World,' Jenkins focuses on Timothy I of Baghdad, Patriarch, or Catholicos, of the Church of the East around 800. His ecclesiastical jurisdiction extended far beyond Mesopotamia.

Jenkins estimates that, in terms of the extent of his ecclesial jurisdiction, Timothy may have been the most important Christian leader of his day, with possibly a quarter of the world's Christians under his care. While the medieval church in England had two archbishops (or, as the Eastern church called them, metropolitans) at York and Canterbury, Timothy oversaw 12 metropolitans and 85 bishops. J Cole Album Download Sharebeast on this page. One facet of Jenkins's argument gives me pause as a political scientist: A key reason why so many Christian minorities were able to survive into the twentieth century is that they successfully eluded central government authority within relatively inaccessible topography—for example, the Maronite Christians of Mount Lebanon and the Orthodox Montenegrins in the Ottoman-dominated Balkans.