When European travelers arrived in China, they discovered an indigenous Christian population, a fact that shocked many of their contemporaries back home. The existence of China’s Christians was however confirmed by a spectacular stela from the town of Xi’an. In the early part of the 17th century, a Chinese scholar named Zhang Gengyou sent a copy of this inscription to some Chinese Christian scholars, who eventually passed it on to the Portuguese Jesuit priest Alvaro Semedo around 1625. This stele is the earliest record we have of Chinese Christianity and suggests that despite the narrative of Christianity as a colonial intruder in China, it had flourished with imperial patronage since at least the 8th century.
The Nestorian Schism
The Church of the East
The European observers of Chinese Christians were Catholics who followed the Chalcedonian branch of Christianity. China’s Christians, on the other hand belonged to the Church of the East, an Aramaic-speaking Nestorian church, named after Patriarch Nestorius of Constantinople. Nestorius and his followers believed that Christ had two separate natures, one human and one divine, but that only the human one had manifested upon his coming to earth. Therefore, Jesus on earth was not truly God incarnate, and Mary was not the Mother of God or the God-bearer (Gk. Theotokos). This was in conflict with the Catholic (meaning universal) teaching as agreed upon definitively at the later Council of Chalcedon in 451AD. Nestorius’ followers were anathematized at the 431AD Council of Ephesus, and many of his followers sought shelter with Rome’s rival, Sassanian Persia.
Even before Nestorius, Aramaic-speaking Christian missionaries had been active in Mesopotamia, Iran, and India, an effort begun by the Apostle Thomas shorty after Jesus’ crucifixtion. They were successful in gaining converts throughout these lands despite persecutions from the Zoroastrian Sassanian rulers. In 410, the Sassanian Emperor Yazdgerd I co-opted the Christians of his empire, organizing them into a new “Persian Church” called the Church of the East, with its own hierarchy, bishops, and patriarch known as the Katholikos. In 424, the church declared itself independent of Rome but remained in communion until the Schism of 431AD, when its doctrines were declared anathema.
Despite being cut off from the Roman Church, the Aramaic-speaking Church of the East thrived under Sassanian and later, Islamic rule, establishing monasteries and dioceses throughout the Near East and Central Asia. Although these areas are overwhelmingly Muslim today and Christians are in many cases a persecuted minority, in the Late Antique and Medieval periods, the Church of the East had dioceses in places such as Herat (Afghanistan), Merv (Turkmenistan), Samarkand and Tashkent (Uzbekistan), on the Malabar Coast of India, and in Iran, subsuming the Christian communities established there since the days of the Apostle Thomas.
Into the Middle Kingdom
As Syriac missionaries moved east, they entered China, establishing the “Persian religion” with imperial patronage. This story is recorded in the 781 Nestorian Stele, featured at the top of the post. The Chinese title translates to Eulogizing the Propagation of the Illustrious Religion in China. It begins by describing Christianity, the Trinity, the creation of Adam, the fall, the prophets of the Old Testament, the Nativity and the codification of the New Testament. The Nestorian character of the stela is immediately clear from the beginning, mentioning Jesus’ two natures and the variety of schisms of early Christianity. It accurately quantifies the number of books of the Bible and Christian doctrines, suggesting that whoever wrote it was intimately familiar with Christianity. After this historical preamble, we are given a fascinating and likely embellished account of how Christianity first found its way into China.
According to the stela, a Syrian missionary named Olopun arrived in China and was brought before Emperor Taizong in 635AD. Olopun spent three years discussing religion with the emperor and convinced Taizong of the value, truths, and simplicity contained in Christianity. He established a church in the imperial capital, and Taizong’s successor Gaozong continued his work, ordering the construction of churches throughout China. Subsequent emperors maintained and repaired the churches through times of upheaval caused by the presence of Buddhism in China, and we have mentions in the stela of portraits of these Chinese emperors within the churches themselves as testament to imperial protection.
The Church of the East in China maintained contacts with Syria and Persia. These areas served as a source of priests and scholars, some of whom served in the Chinese imperial bureaucracy. At the end of the stela we see the importance some of these priests and the officials that patronized the church. Among them are several bishops, testifying to the importance and size of China’s Christian community, several priests some of whom are probably Syrian while others are clearly Chinese, and the military governor of Taizhou, who is not denoted as a Christian, but was an important local official nonetheless. One of the Chinese priest is also described as having been conferred a “purple gown” and the position of assistant examiner for China’s civil service examination system, attesting to the Church of the East’s imperial connections and the high positions that some of its clergy managed to obtain. Unfortunately for the Church of the East, this privileged situation did not last, as factors related to the influence of Buddhism in China caused the Tang Dynasty to rethink its patronage of the “Persian religion.”
Persecution and Decline
In 842, the Chinese emperor Wuzong began a persecution of Buddhism to eradicate what he saw as a subversive foreign religion, seizing the wealth of monasteries and driving out their monks and other holy men. However, Wuzong did not stop with Buddhism. He turned his attention to the Church of the East and meted out a similar fate. Clergymen were offered the choices of renouncing their faith, exile, or death, while churches were destroyed or converted for other uses. Chinese sources state that the emperor viewed Christianity as a destructive foreign religion as well, and as a result of the expansion of the persecutions, the vibrant Christian community of China quickly declined. Although Christianity had failed to permanently take hold in China, the country had proved a remarkably fertile land for evangelization, and the Church of the East would return there following the Mongol conquest of the country under the Yuan Dynasty in the 13th century, much to the amazement of one Marco Polo.
Sources and Further Reading
The text of the stele can be found here. For an alternate translation and pictures, see The Nestorian Monument by James Legge.
So interesting!! Thank you for sharing.