From Apostles to a World Faith

In 781, Christians in Tang China erected a large stone monument near the imperial capital of Chang’an. The inscription, written primarily in Chinese with Syriac elements, looked backward over roughly a century and a half of Christian presence in China. It described the arrival of a teacher commonly rendered in modern scholarship as Alopen in 635, imperial reception, the translation of texts, monasteries, periods of patronage, and the community’s place within the Tang world.

The monument is often called the Xi’an Stele or, in older literature, the “Nestorian Monument.” Modern scholarship increasingly prefers more precise language because Nestorian can flatten the Christological and ecclesial complexity of the Church of the East. Scott Fitzgerald Johnson’s close study of the monument emphasizes precisely what makes it so valuable for the history of mission: it is a document of cultural translation. Syriac Christians in Tang China were simultaneously preserving ties to Persian and Central Asian Christian worlds and presenting their faith within Chinese political and conceptual language.¹

The monument matters not because it proves Christianity had already “conquered” Asia. The community later declined, and the Tang Christian presence did not produce a continuous mass Christian tradition. It matters because it breaks one of the most persistent modern assumptions about Christian geography.

Christianity did not spend its first fifteen centuries sealed inside Europe, waiting for modern Europeans to make it global.

Several Christian Worlds From the Beginning

Jerusalem is the obvious beginning of church history, but Acts itself already complicates any single-center map. Antioch becomes a major missionary center. Alexandria develops into one of the great intellectual and ecclesial centers of early Christianity. Rome becomes increasingly influential in the Latin West. Edessa and other Syriac-speaking centers become crucial to Christian life east of the Roman frontier.

The geography matters because theological history is often narrated through councils, bishops, and controversies associated with the Roman and Byzantine worlds. Those developments are central, but they can create the impression that Christianity outside the Mediterranean center was peripheral or derivative.

In reality, Christians lived and theologized within several imperial and linguistic environments.

Greek Christianity developed one set of institutions and intellectual traditions.

Latin Christianity developed another.

Syriac Christianity became a major theological, liturgical, and missionary world in its own right.

Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Ge’ez, and other traditions localized Christian life within languages and histories that did not depend upon later Western European forms.

Missionary history therefore begins with plurality.

Antioch and the Eastward Imagination. Antioch linked several worlds. It was a major city of the Roman East, a place associated with early Gentile Christianity, and a gateway toward Syriac-speaking regions. The importance of Syriac Christianity is difficult to overstate for any history that wants to escape a purely westward narrative.

Syriac, a form of Aramaic, became a major Christian literary language. Biblical translation, poetry, theology, monasticism, and liturgy developed through it. The Peshitta became central to Syriac churches. Writers such as Ephrem the Syrian demonstrate a theological style whose poetic imagination differs markedly from the Latin scholastic frameworks many later Western Christians assume to be normal Christianity.

This matters missiologically. Christianity does not merely survive translation. It becomes intellectually fruitful through translation.

When theology enters another language, it does not simply replace every local category with a foreign one. Christians ask questions in that language. They write hymns in its rhythms. They select metaphors that make sense inside its literary world. They develop controversies and devotional practices shaped by their own contexts.

Translation therefore produces agency.

Christianity Beyond the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire occupies an enormous place in Christian historical memory because of persecution, Constantine, the councils, and the later Christianization of imperial institutions. Yet Christianity also crossed into the Sasanian Persian Empire, where association with Rome could be politically dangerous.

Persian Christianity developed under conditions in which Christians could be suspected of sympathy with Rome, especially after the Roman Empire itself became increasingly Christian. Ecclesial differentiation from Roman Christianity therefore involved both theology and geopolitics.

The Church of the East eventually developed structures that extended far beyond Mesopotamia. Bishops, monasteries, merchants, clergy, and Christian communities appeared along routes connecting Persia, Central Asia, India, and China.

The word missionary can be too narrow if it causes us to imagine only formally commissioned religious specialists. Trade, migration, monasteries, family networks, and ecclesial expansion all contributed to Christianity’s movement.

This pattern will later reappear in modern diaspora mission. Christian faith travels with people whose primary social identity may not be “missionary.”

Armenia and the Christianization of a Kingdom

Armenia occupies a distinctive place in Christian history as one of the earliest kingdoms to adopt Christianity institutionally. Traditional chronology often places the conversion of King Tiridates III and the work of Gregory the Illuminator in the early fourth century, though exact dating and reconstruction of the conversion process require careful historical treatment.

What followed is more important for our purposes than a debate over one exact year.

Christianity became deeply embedded in Armenian identity.

The development of the Armenian alphabet in the early fifth century, associated with Mesrop Mashtots, enabled translation and literary production that profoundly rooted Christianity in Armenian language and memory. Scripture translation and vernacular Christian literature did not merely communicate a foreign religion. They helped create a durable Armenian Christian intellectual world.

This is one reason language matters so much to mission. A missionary can preach through an interpreter. A church becomes more deeply rooted when it can pray, argue, teach, remember, and theologize in its own language.

Alexandria and African Christianity. Africa was never simply a later recipient of European Christianity.

Alexandria became one of the great centers of ancient Christian scholarship and ecclesial authority. Figures associated with North African Christianity shaped the theology of the entire church: Athanasius, Cyril, Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, and many others. Egyptian monasticism became one of Christianity’s most influential spiritual movements.

The theological traditions that later European Christians inherited were therefore partly African before Christianity ever became socially dominant in northern Europe.

This point should not become a rhetorical reversal that simply claims ancient North Africans through modern racial categories. The Mediterranean world did not organize identity through twenty-first-century racial concepts. The historical correction is geographic and civilizational: Africa belongs near the center of early Christian history.

Aksum: Christianity in the Horn of Africa

The kingdom of Aksum provides one of the strongest examples of early Christianity becoming institutionally rooted south of Egypt.

Evidence from inscriptions and coinage associates King Ezana’s conversion with the mid-fourth century. Scholarly discussion links the early Aksumite church with Frumentius and the Alexandrian episcopate. Aksumite Christianity later developed into the long and distinctive Ethiopian Orthodox tradition.²

The process should not be simplified into a king converting and an entire people instantly becoming Christian. Royal conversion, ecclesial structures, monasteries, local religious practices, and popular Christianization unfolded over time.

The distinction is important because mission history often confuses elite adoption with population conversion. A ruler’s Christian profession can change institutional conditions dramatically without telling us what every household believes.

Still, the Ethiopian case decisively undermines the idea that Christianity became African principally through nineteenth-century Western missions.

Ethiopian Christianity is ancient.

Nubia: A Christian Civilization Often Forgotten. Farther north along the Nile, Christian kingdoms developed in Nubia beginning in late antiquity. Nobadia, Makuria, and Alwa became Christian political and cultural worlds whose history extended for centuries.

Modern archaeological work, much of it accelerated by salvage campaigns associated with the Aswan High Dam, transformed scholarly understanding of medieval Nubia. Older histories often treated the region as a marginal Christian remnant between Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa. Archaeology revealed complex urban, artistic, ecclesial, and political life. Scholars have emphasized that Christian Nubian states played significant roles in the Nile valley for many centuries.³

Again, the significance is not merely that an unexpected place was once Christian.

Christianity’s geographic history is reversible.

A region can possess mature Christian institutions for centuries and later become overwhelmingly associated with another religious tradition.

Church presence is not permanent simply because it was once strong.

This historical instability should make modern Christians cautious about language implying that a country or people has been permanently “reached.”

Christianity in India: Tradition and Evidence

Few early missionary stories are as beloved as the tradition that the apostle Thomas personally evangelized India.

South India’s Thomas Christian communities possess deep traditions associating their origins with the apostle. The Acts of Thomas, probably composed in Syriac in the third century, narrates an apostolic mission to India and became part of a living memory connecting Indian Christians with apostolic origins.

The historical problem is evidence.

Nathanael Andrade’s study of Christianity’s journey toward India in late antiquity stresses the danger of treating literary traditions such as the Acts of Thomas as straightforward documentary evidence for an apostolic journey. The text reflects real Christian worlds and historical imagination but cannot simply prove that the apostle himself founded the Indian churches.⁴

A responsible account therefore says:

ancient Indian Christian tradition associates its origins with Thomas.

It does not say:

historians have established that Thomas founded the church in India.

This caution does not weaken the historical importance of Indian Christianity. Syriac-linked Christian communities existed in India long before Portuguese arrival. They participated in Indian social worlds and wider eastern Christian networks.

European missionaries therefore did not bring Christianity for the first time to a religiously blank India. They encountered Christians whose traditions, leadership, liturgy, and ecclesial relationships were already established.

That encounter would later reveal a recurring missionary problem: outsiders can mistake unfamiliar Christianity for deficient Christianity.

Indian Ocean Networks. Christianity’s movement toward India also reminds us that ancient globalization did not depend on the modern nation-state.

The Indian Ocean connected ports through trade, migration, and diplomacy. Merchants moved between the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, Arabian Peninsula, western India, and beyond. Religious communities traveled with those networks.

Mission therefore often follows connectivity.

The Silk Road and Indian Ocean were not “mission strategies” invented by agencies. They were human networks through which merchants, monks, texts, and communities moved.

Modern mission often works similarly. International universities, global labor markets, refugee routes, multinational companies, and digital networks create relational pathways no mission agency designed.

The church’s task is partly to recognize where people already move.

Central Asia and the Silk Roads. The eastward history of the Church of the East cannot be understood without Central Asia.

Christian communities appeared among populations connected through Sogdian and other commercial networks. Archaeological and textual discoveries from places such as Turfan and Dunhuang demonstrate Christian presence and adaptation across the Silk Road world.

The evidence is fragmentary. Fragmentary does not mean trivial.

It reveals Christianity operating within religiously plural environments that included Buddhism, Zoroastrian traditions, Manichaeism, local religions, and later Islam.

This complicates another modern missionary assumption: religious pluralism is not a uniquely contemporary condition. Christians have long lived and communicated faith within environments containing several sophisticated religious traditions.

Tang China and Cultural Translation

The Xi’an Stele gives unusually vivid evidence of this process.

The Christian community’s Chinese terminology interacted with concepts familiar from Buddhist and Daoist literary worlds. Scholars debate the precise meanings and adequacy of particular translations, but the basic process is unmistakable: Christianity had to become linguistically intelligible in Chinese.

This created risks.

Translation can clarify.

Translation can also distort.

A term borrowed from another religious environment may communicate one aspect of Christian teaching while importing unintended meanings.

Missionaries and local Christians therefore continually face a contextual question:

How can Christian faith become genuinely intelligible without losing the theological claims that make it Christian?

The problem did not begin with twentieth-century contextualization theory.

Tang Christians were already living it.

The 845 Suppression and the Fragility of Presence. Tang Christianity did not expand in a straight line. Imperial patronage changed. The major suppression of foreign religions under Emperor Wuzong in the mid-ninth century affected Buddhist institutions and also Christianity, among other traditions. Christian communities declined sharply.

Later centuries saw renewed Christian presence, including during the Mongol period, but continuity was uneven.

This history matters missionally because it demonstrates the difference between presence and durable reproduction.

A religion can possess:

• imperial permission;
• monasteries;
• translated texts;
• clergy;

and still remain vulnerable if its social roots are shallow or political conditions change dramatically.

The missionary goal therefore cannot be institutional presence alone.

The Mongol World. The Mongol expansions of the thirteenth century created another period of extraordinary Eurasian connectivity. Christians associated with the Church of the East existed among several Central Asian and Mongol populations. Some influential Mongol women were Christians. European Catholic missions also entered the Mongol world. Travelers encountered religiously plural courts where Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and others competed and interacted.

This period further demonstrates that “East” and “West” were never hermetically sealed Christian-geographic categories.

Christian networks extended across Eurasia in several directions.

Yet again, many communities later declined.

The history of global Christianity is a history of expansion and contraction.

Translation as a Missionary Engine. Across these cases—Armenian, Syriac, Ethiopian, Indian, Chinese—translation repeatedly appears near the center.

Lamin Sanneh famously emphasized Christianity’s vernacularizing tendency. The Christian message, rooted in Scripture already translated across Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek worlds, proved capable of entering new languages without requiring permanent allegiance to one sacred missionary language.

Andrew Walls described related dynamics through the “indigenizing” and “pilgrim” principles: Christianity takes root within cultures while also judging every culture through allegiance to Christ.

These ideas help explain how Christianity repeatedly escaped missionary ownership.

A foreign missionary may initiate translation.

Once Scripture exists in the local language, local Christians can read without the missionary.

They can challenge the missionary’s interpretation.

They can preach.

They can write theology.

They can transmit Christianity through local relationships.

Translation therefore carries a decentralizing potential.⁵

Local Agency Before Modern Mission

The history also challenges the assumption that local agency became important only after decolonization.

Christian communities were never simply containers filled by missionary activity. They selected, resisted, adapted, translated, and institutionalized Christian faith.

Armenian Christians developed a national literary tradition.

Ethiopian Christianity developed monastic and ecclesial worlds deeply rooted in the highlands.

Nubian Christians sustained kingdoms for centuries.

Indian Christians maintained ancient ecclesial traditions through changing political environments.

Syriac Christians carried faith along Asian networks.

Chinese Christians translated Christian language into Tang intellectual forms.

Foreign and local are therefore relative categories. The missionary who is foreign in one generation may be followed by a church whose descendants are thoroughly local.

This transition is one of mission’s recurring historical achievements.

Women in Early Global Christianity. The surviving evidence often foregrounds bishops, kings, monks, and male clerical institutions because those actors produced the documents historians possess. That should not lead us to imagine Christian transmission as exclusively male.

Women played central roles in household Christianity, monastic movements, patronage, teaching, and the transmission of faith through family and community. Elite Christian women could shape courts and institutions; ordinary women carried religious practice through households in ways the sources record unevenly.

The problem of visibility becomes even greater in later mission history, where women constituted a major proportion of missionary workers while formal authority often remained male. Chapter 7 will make their agency explicit rather than treating women as an appendix to a male missionary story.

Christianity Was Global—but Not Everywhere. Correcting Eurocentric history can produce its own exaggeration.

Christianity was geographically expansive before modern colonialism.

It was not evenly distributed.

Large parts of humanity had little or no Christian presence. Even where Christian communities existed, they varied enormously in size and durability. Tang Christianity’s existence does not mean China was broadly Christianized. Ancient Indian Christianity does not mean the subcontinent possessed equal Christian access. Ethiopian Christianity’s depth does not describe all of Africa.

The accurate conclusion is more modest and more important:

Christianity was culturally plural and transregional long before modern European empire.

Europe later became an extraordinarily powerful Christian center.

It was never the only center.

The Historical Question Changes

By the late medieval and early modern periods, European Christian expansion entered a new phase. Maritime empires connected continents through military and commercial power on a scale that transformed missionary possibility. Catholic orders traveled with Iberian expansion. Later Protestant missionary societies developed new voluntary structures. Printing, modern transportation, industrial wealth, colonial rule, antislavery movements, education, medicine, and global political domination became entangled with mission.

The relationship would prove morally and historically complex.

Missionaries sometimes challenged empire.

Sometimes they served it.

Often they could not be understood apart from it even when they opposed particular colonial policies.

To understand modern global Christianity, we need to examine that entanglement without reducing one reality to the other.

Footnotes

1. Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, “Silk Road Christians and the Translation of Culture in Tang China,” Studies in Church History 53 (2017): 15–38. Johnson interprets the 781 Xi’an monument as an artifact of Syriac-Chinese cultural translation and community self-presentation. See also Samuel N. C. Lieu, “Christians and Manichaeans on the Silk Road,” European Review 33 (2025): 401–15. ↩

2. Stephanie L. Black, “‘In the Power of God Christ’: Greek Inscriptional Evidence for the Anti-Arian Theology of Ethiopia’s First Christian King,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 71 (2008); David W. Phillipson, Ancient Ethiopia: Aksum, Its Antecedents and Successors (British Museum Press, 1998), and related scholarship on Ezana and Aksumite Christianity. ↩

3. P. L. Shinnie and M. Shinnie, “New Light on Medieval Nubia,” Journal of African History; Derek A. Welsby, The Medieval Kingdoms of Nubia: Pagans, Christians and Muslims along the Middle Nile (British Museum Press, 2002). Cambridge historical surveys describe the Nubian Christian kingdoms as major political and cultural actors across many centuries. ↩

4. Nathanael J. Andrade, The Journey of Christianity to India in Late Antiquity: Networks and the Movement of Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2018), especially the methodological introduction concerning the Acts of Thomas and the distinction between living tradition and historical demonstration. ↩

5. Robert Louis Wilken, The First Thousand Years: A Global History of Christianity (Yale University Press, 2012); Samuel Hugh Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, 2 vols. (Orbis Books); Walls, Missionary Movement; Sanneh, Translating the Message. ↩