Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (42 page)

Ethiopia's Semitic links are also apparent in the unique fascination with Judaism which has developed in its Christianity. This is reminiscent of the distinctively close relationship with Judaism in early Syriac Christianity (see pp. 178-9), but over a much longer period the character has become much more pronounced in Ethiopia. This may not originally have arisen so much from direct contacts with Jews as from Ethiopian pride in that foundation episode in the Book of Acts, in which Christianity's Jewish heritage already lies at the heart of the story of Philip and the eunuch. Meditation on this during the passing of centuries in the isolation of Africa has made that seed grow into a major theme in a Church which honours the Jewish Sabbath, practises circumcision (female as well as male, unlike the Jews), and makes its members obey Jewish dietary laws. External sources as early as the thirteenth century record the Church as treasuring an object which was claimed to be the Ark of the Covenant once housed in the Temple in Jerusalem. The report that the Ark was decorated with crosses does present problems for this provenance, given that, if genuine, it had been constructed a millennium before the Crucifixion.
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At its extreme, the preoccupation with the Hebrew past in Ethiopian Christianity has produced a grouping of peoples first attested in Ethiopia in the fourteenth century, who have been styled by other Ethiopians
Falasha
, 'Strangers', but who call themselves
Beta Israel
('House of Israel') because they claim full Jewish identity. In recent years, most of the
Beta Israel
have emigrated to the State of Israel.
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Central to the complex of associations with Israel and Judaism is a foundational work of Ethiopian literature, the
Kebra Nagast
, the 'Book of the Glory of Kings'. It is this work, difficult to date and composite in character, which sets out the origins of the Ethiopian monarchy in the union of King Solomon of Israel and the Queen of Sheba, that legendary ruler of a Yemeni kingdom whom the Tanakh had recorded as visiting Jerusalem in great splendour. What is now considered to be a late addition to the accounts in the
Kebra Nagast
is the story that their son Menelik, the first Ethiopian king, brought the Ark, or
tabot
, back to Ethiopia, where it is kept to this day in a chapel in Aksum. Every Ethiopian church has a much-venerated representation of the
tabot
in its sanctuary. Quite when the
tabot
at Aksum became so important in Ethiopian devotion is controversial. The latest historian to consider the confused and partial evidence places it as late as the end of the sixteenth century, when recent Islamic destruction and bruising contacts with the wider Christian world made the Ethiopian Church particularly concerned to assert its special character and enrich its existing Jewish traditions (see pp. 711-12).
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The original form of the
Kebra Nagast
is certainly much older, and it may relate to a period in the sixth century when Aksum was at one of its peaks of power. This formidable Christian empire under King Kaleb then had an intimate concern with the land of the Queen of Sheba, the Yemen. The active role which Ethiopia now seized in the politics of Yemen and Arabia was one of the great might-have-beens of history, and would certainly explain the later fascination in Ethiopia with Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. In the early years of the sixth century, Miaphysite Christian refugees from the Byzantine Empire gathered in the Yemeni city of Najran (now in south-west Saudi Arabia), attracted by an existing Christian community, and the city became a major centre for Miaphysite Christianity. In 523 or 524 its population suffered a horrific massacre at the hands of their overlord, Yusuf as'ar Yath'ar of the Yemeni kingdom of Himyar; in the previous century, his family had converted to Judaism and his campaigns were expressions of his own militant zeal for recreating Israel in Arabia. King Kaleb of Ethiopia, already provoked by Yusuf's killing of Ethiopian soldiers, forcefully intervened across the Red Sea after this outrage and defeated and killed Yusuf.
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With Ethiopian backing, a local Miaphysite ruler, Abraha, now came to establish a kingdom in southern Arabia which had Miaphysite Christianity as its state religion. This might have become the future of the Arabian peninsula, had it not been for a major disaster of engineering: in the 570s, the ancient and famous Marib dam, on which the agricultural prosperity of the region depended, and which had undergone thorough repair under King Abraha, nevertheless suffered a catastrophic failure. After more than a thousand years of existence, it was never rebuilt until modern times. A complex and wealthy society which had flourished on the irrigation provided by the dam was ruined for ever, and with the collapsing dam must have perished much of the credibility of Christianity throughout Arabia. Five hundred miles to the north, in the same decade that the dam failed, there was born an Arab destined to be a new prophet: Muhammad (see pp. 255-9). The memory of the end of the Marib dam, when Sheba's gardens were replaced 'with others that yielded bitter fruit', was still traumatic enough to win a mention in Muhammad's revelations in the Qur'an, where the disaster was described as a punishment from God for Sheba's faithlessness.
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But before we meet the new prophet and the impact of his faith on the world, we must turn to the other dissidence against Chalcedon: the Church of the East, the Dyophysite heirs of Theodore of Mopsuestia.

THE CHURCH OF THE EAST (451-622)

At the time of the Council of Chalcedon, with Nestorius declared a non-person despite the council's quiet acceptance of much of his theology, matters looked dire for defiant Dyophysites. They had no power base in the Byzantine Empire comparable to Miaphysite Alexandria, and even eastwards beyond the imperial frontier there was no secure refuge for them among Syrian Christians in the Sassanian Empire. The mid-fifth century saw renewed pogroms of Christians by the Zoroastrian authorities. In the worst sequence under Shah Yazdgerd II, what is now the Iraqi city of Kirkuk witnessed the slaughter of ten bishops and reputedly 153,000 Christians (a biblically symbolic number for a figure which was clearly still grotesquely large). Nevertheless, persecution was not a consistent Sassanian policy, and the Church survived and consolidated; because the Byzantine Empire reaffirmed Chalcedonian Christianity or tried to woo the Miaphysites, it was not surprising that east Syrian Christianity took on an increasingly explicit commitment to the Dyophysite cause.

A significant shift took place in 489, when the Byzantine Emperor Zeno in his drive to placate Miaphysites finally closed the School of the Persians in the city of Edessa (now Urfa in Turkey). This had been the major centre of higher education for Christians throughout the East, both within and beyond the empire, but now a school was established little more than 150 miles eastwards in Sassanian territory, in the city of Nisibis (now Nusaybin in the extreme south-east of Turkey), ready to take on the duty of training Dyophysite clergy. In Nisibis Greek works could be translated and expounded to Syriac-speakers: the Church was concerned to preserve even the works of pre-Christian Greek philosophy so that they could be used as intellectual tools for arguments with Chalcedonian and Miaphysite Christians. This was of huge importance for a wider future (see pp. 266-7). Moreover, the flow of knowledge to Nisibis was not just from the west. It was a Christian scholar from Nisibis, Severus, with a Persian surname, Sebokht, abbot and bishop of a monastery on the Euphrates, who in the mid-seventh century first described a system of mathematical signs invented by Indians, which were then absorbed into Islamic culture and are therefore known to us as Arabic numerals.
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The scholars of Nisibis did not have a monopoly of Christian higher education; the most important other centre was far to the south, in the settler city of Gondeshapur. In the time of the unusually tolerant and cultured Shah Khusrau I (reigned 531-79), a contemporary of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, the Christian school in Gondeshapur was promoted into a centre of general learning, with a richly augmented library whose holdings united such widely separated cultures as Greece and India. Syriac remained the chief medium of instruction in this school. If anything helped to integrate Syriac Christianity into Sassanian elite life after its traumatic sufferings, it was the role of Gondeshapur in providing a series of skilled physicians who were Dyophysite Christians, and who became doctors first to the shahs and later to Islamic rulers in Seleucia-Ctesiphon. It was only the founding of Baghdad and its schools two centuries later which outshone the importance of Gondeshapur for learning and the preservation of ancient culture; but now Baghdad's predecessor, the once-famous centre of power and scholarship, has been utterly eclipsed, and its scanty visible ruins near a little Iranian village have never even been excavated.
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Dyophysite Christianity also spread south of the great empires, into the peninsula of Arabia, where there had long been tribes embracing Christianity. There were strong contrary influences here to turn the existing Christian presence towards Miaphysite belief, thanks to external powers like the Miaphysite Ethiopians and Ghassanids, and we have seen those having an effect on local rulers in Sheba (see pp. 244-5). Yet political rivalries meant that by no means all Arab Christians were going to follow suit; in fact, some embraced Dyophysite Christianity precisely because the Ghassanids believed the opposite. What was significant about this dual character of Christian activity in Arabia was how little Arabian Christians were inclined to identify with the imperial Church of Chalcedon: they set their sights on Semitic versions of the faith. The trade routes to Syria, southwards to Arabia and the Red Sea, which Ghassanid power kept open and secure, brought Syrian theology and worship into the peninsula. One paradoxical trace of that is the presence of a substantial number of Syriac loanwords in the text of Arabian Christianity's nemesis, the Qur'an; these probably derive from Muhammad's knowledge of Jewish and Christian sacred texts in that language. This is a hint that, as elsewhere in the Christianity which had Syriac roots, the liturgical and scriptural language of Arabian Christianity remained Syriac rather than the Arabian vernacular of the region.
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By the sixth century, therefore, the Church of the East was fully established, both in its independence of any bishop in the Byzantine Empire and in its firm adherence to the theology condemned at Chalcedon. Its principal bishop or patriarch, normally resident in one of the great cities of the Sassanian Empire, was known as the Catholicos, 'universal bishop' - a title as reasonable as the high claims of the Bishops of Rome or Constantinople, considering the wide areas and increasing numbers of Christians who looked to this bishop as their chief pastor. As much as the 'Melchite' Chalcedonians or the Miaphysites, its spiritual life was sustained by a rapid expansion of monastic life. Many monasteries in the East had fallen into disarray during the troubles of the later fifth century, and in 571 one powerful monastic personality, Abraham of Kashkar, created a set of rules to restore discipline to their life. When his successor in the Great Monastery in the Izla Mountains above Nisibis, Abbot Dadisho, augmented Abraham's rule seventeen years later, he firmly stated a test of doctrinal purity: anyone who 'does not accept the Orthodox fathers Mar Diodore [of Tarsus], Mar Theodore [of Mopsuestia] and Mar Nestorius shall be unknown to our community'.
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Monasteries among the Dyophysites were strengthened through the military success of the Sassanian Shah Khusrau II in areas of the Byzantine Empire along the eastern Mediterranean. For a couple of decades from 605 the Shah had control of the hills of Tur 'Abdin, where the monasteries had previously been divided between Melchite and Miaphysite communities (see p. 237). From this date, some monastic communities of Dyophysites held on to their places in Tur 'Abdin, and it was not until after 1838 that the last monks from the Church of the East left this enclave of extraordinary Christian sanctity.
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The Church of the East was now travelling astonishing distances away from the heartlands of the previous Christian centuries: eastwards along land and sea routes which connected the Roman and Sassanian worlds with China and India - and noticeably without any political support. To begin with, it must have been something like a chaplaincy for expatriates, but it was also a mission which could draw on the natural articulacy and propensity for salesmanship which made Syrian merchants so successful across Asia. During the fourth and fifth centuries the east Syrians reached out beyond the Sassanian Empire and established Christian outposts among the peoples of Central Asia, and over the next centuries they moved steadily onwards in their activities, which means that in such unexpected places as the mountains and plains around Samarqand, so long the territory of Islam, it is possible to have the shock of encountering the sight of carved medieval crosses or inscriptions in Syriac.
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One of the Syrians' earliest extensions of the Christian faith was to India. The 'Mar Thoma' Church there treasures a claim to have been founded by the Apostle Thomas, which is not beyond the bounds of possibility, given the evidence that archaeology has revealed of vigorous trade between the Roman Empire and India in the first century CE. Traditions about Thomas certainly already triggered an early-third-century apocryphal Syrian account of his deeds in the subcontinent (see p. 202). By the fourth century there was a sufficiently organized Church in the Malabar Coast in south-west India (what is now Kerala) that arrangements were made to put it under the authority of the bishop in one of the main trading ports in the Sassanian Empire, Rew Ardashir (now Bushehr on the Persian Gulf).
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A century later, a Christian writer from Alexandria called Cosmas took a nickname from his extraordinary travels around India -
Indicopleustes
, 'voyager to India' - though the traveller was also an eyewitness of King Kaleb of Ethiopia's momentous campaign in the Yemen in the 520s (see pp. 244-5). Despite coming from Egypt, Cosmas Indicopleustes was a Dyophysite, steeped in the writings of Theodore of Mopsuestia and Diodore of Tarsus, and he sneered at the recent 'schismatical Father', the exiled Bishop Theodosius of Alexandria. He was proud of the Church of the East, which had spread its faith from Persia to Churches in India and even Sri Lanka, rejoicing that his travels had shown him how the whole earth was 'still being filled, and that the gospel is preached throughout all the world'. It is a pity from the point of view of modern historians that his one surviving work devotes itself primarily to cosmological questions centring on the failed proposition that the world is flat, but we still need to be grateful for its incidental remarks on the world that Cosmas actually knew; we have so little other evidence.
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