The very ancient \u201cHanging Church\u201d in the Coptic section of Old Cairo has long been a favorite place for me.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
This column appeared in the Deseret News<\/em> on 15 November 2014:<\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Jesus, of course, was born and raised in Palestine. Like his apostles and earliest disciples, he was a Middle Eastern Jew. Christianity emerged from a Hebrew matrix, drawing on stories of prophets and patriarchs firmly set in the Middle East.<\/span><\/p>\nAll Christians know this, as does anybody even slightly acquainted with the Christian story.<\/span><\/p>\nYet we sometimes fail to understand the historical implications of Christianity\u2019s Middle Eastern origins.<\/span><\/p>\nAn Egyptian friend relates an anecdote that illustrates our point. He once surprised a European visitor to his country by identifying himself as a Christian. \u201cWho converted your family?\u201d the European tourist asked. \u201cWas it the British, or the French?\u201d \u201cIt was St. Mark,\u201d he replied. \u201cWho converted your family?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nOur European ancestors waited centuries, sometimes even a full millennium, to hear the message of Christianity. But Mark the Evangelist brought Christianity to Alexandria by about A.D. 49 \u2014 in other words, within two decades of the resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ \u2014 and his message took root among the huge Jewish community there and soon spread beyond it.<\/span><\/p>\nToday, both the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Greek Orthodox Church of Alexandria claim him as their founder. And he likely was. The traditions of his early preaching in Egypt are very old, and had Egyptian Christians simply been inventing the story in rivalry with Rome, they probably would have chosen a more prominent figure, such as Peter, to be their founding father.<\/span><\/p>\nChristianity is, and has always been, a Middle Eastern religion. Although nowadays it\u2019s prominently associated with Rome, Marburg, Canterbury and, for some of us, Salt Lake City, that hasn\u2019t always been so. The rise and expansion of Islam have obscured the Christian faith\u2019s deep roots in what we today term the Near or Middle East.<\/span><\/p>\nSaul, or Paul, grew up in Tarsus, in modern south-central Turkey, and eventually made Ephesus, nowadays a major tourist destination in western Turkey, his missionary headquarters for about three years. Later, Ephesus reputedly became the residence of the apostle John. Some traditions even say that John brought the Virgin Mary with him, in order to fulfill his pledge at the foot of the cross to care for the Savior\u2019s mother. Eventually, John was exiled to Patmos, a small island just off the Turkish coast.<\/span><\/p>\nIn the first centuries after the establishment of the Christian church, its most prominent leaders, saints and thinkers were overwhelmingly eastern, not western. Ignatius of Antioch served as a bishop in what is today Turkey.<\/span><\/p>\nClement, Origen and Athanasius were dominant figures \u2014 Athanasius was the city\u2019s bishop \u2014 in Alexandria, on Egypt\u2019s Mediterranean shore. Eusebius of Caesarea, often described as the very first historian of Christianity (presumably after Luke and the authors of the other New Testament gospels), was the bishop of Caesarea Maritima, Herod\u2019s once-flourishing port city whose spectacular ruins still attract many tourists to the northern Israeli coast today. Even Tertullian and the enormously influential bishop Augustine, two of the most important figures in the history of Latin or Western Christianity, came from North Africa \u2014 from, respectively, Carthage, in what is now called Tunisia, and the city of Hippo Regius, located in modern Algeria.<\/span><\/p>\nAll of the first seven \u201cecumenical councils\u201d of the Christian church, as they\u2019re called \u2014 Nicea I (A.D. 325), Constantinople I (381), Ephesus I (431), Chalcedon (451), Constantinople II (553), Constantinople III (680-681), and Nicea II (787) \u2014 in the course of which the fundamental creeds of mainstream Christianity were hammered out during contentious and often raucous meetings, took place in what is today western Turkey.<\/span><\/p>\nOf the roughly 318 delegates who participated in the first Nicene Council \u2014which was convened by Constantine, the \u201cRoman\u201d emperor who had just announced his intention to found a new capital city that, today, lies in Turkey and bears the name \u201cIstanbul\u201d \u2014 only a small handful came from the Latin West. The vast majority of the attendees, including St. Nicholas, the original \u201cSanta Claus,\u201d represented northern Africa, the eastern Mediterranean and such distant places as Georgia, Armenia, Persia, even India. This was the famous council that, for most traditional Christians, defined the relationship of the Father and the Son (the fundamental issue of the Trinity), established a uniform procedure for setting the date of Easter, and promulgated some of the earliest canon law designed to regulate church government.<\/span><\/p>\nChristianity is sometimes dismissed as a Western faith, the religious legacy of dead, white, European males. Such dismissals are, to be charitable, historically uninformed.<\/span><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
Posted from Las Vegas, Nevada<\/p>\n
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\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 This column appeared in the Deseret News on 15 November 2014: \u00a0 Jesus, of course, was born and raised in Palestine. Like his apostles and earliest disciples, he was a Middle Eastern Jew. Christianity emerged from a Hebrew matrix, drawing on stories of prophets and patriarchs firmly set in the Middle East. All […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n
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Like his apostles\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2019\/02\/christianity-didnt-begin-in-the-west.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Sic et Non\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2019-02-10T00:44:03+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2017\/04\/662px-Cairo_-_Coptic_area_-_Hanging_Church_from_courtyard.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Dan Peterson\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Dan Peterson\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2019\/02\/christianity-didnt-begin-in-the-west.html\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2019\/02\/christianity-didnt-begin-in-the-west.html\",\"name\":\"Christianity didn't begin in \\\"the West\\\"\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2019-02-10T00:44:03+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2019-02-10T00:44:03+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/#\/schema\/person\/77113e9b09701bd1599fa272c4f65045\"},\"description\":\" This column appeared in the Deseret News on 15 November 2014: Jesus, of course, was born and raised in Palestine. 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![\"Al-Muallaqa\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2017\/04\/662px-Cairo_-_Coptic_area_-_Hanging_Church_from_courtyard.jpg\")
<\/a>