Religion & Culture
Nestorian Christianity on the Silk Road
Nestorian Christianity, the form of Christianity associated with the Church of the East, was one of the earliest and most surprising of the religions to…
Nestorian Christianity, the form of Christianity associated with the Church of the East, was one of the earliest and most surprising of the religions to travel the Silk Road. From its base in the Sasanian Persian Empire, where it had taken root in the fifth and sixth centuries, the Church of the East established a chain of bishoprics, monasteries, and merchant communities that stretched across Central Asia and reached the Chinese capital by the seventh century. The most famous single piece of evidence for this long eastward transmission is the Nestorian Stele of Xi’an, erected in 781 CE, which commemorates the arrival of Christianity in China in 635 CE and provides a snapshot of a Christian community that had reached the Pacific.
The terminology requires some care. The term “Nestorian” derives from Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople, who was condemned as a heretic at the Council of Ephesus in 431 for his Christological teaching. The Church of the East rejected the condemnation and developed its own theological tradition, centered in the Sasanian capital of Seleucia-Ctesiphon. The church was a distinct Syriac-speaking Christian communion that traced its origin to the apostolic missions of the first century and developed independently of the Greek-speaking churches of the Roman Empire.
Origins in Sasanian Persia
The Church of the East took root in the Sasanian Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries, partly as a result of the Sasanian policy of supporting Christianity as a way of putting pressure on the Roman Empire. The Sasanian church organized itself around the catholicos of Seleucia-Ctesiphon (on the Tigris, opposite modern Baghdad), and by the sixth century had developed an extensive ecclesiastical structure with bishoprics throughout Mesopotamia, Iran, and Central Asia. The church was intimately connected with the long-distance trade, and Syriac Christian merchants played a major role in the commerce of the Sasanian and early Islamic periods — so much so that the standard merchant diaspora of sixth-century Central Asia was, in effect, a Syriac one.
The church’s eastward expansion was, in effect, the eastward expansion of the Syriac merchant diaspora. By the seventh century, Church of the East communities existed in every major oasis city of the Tarim Basin — Kashgar, Khotan, Kucha, Turfan, Dunhuang — and the religion had reached the Tang dynasty Chinese capital. The chain of bishoprics along the Silk Road was one of the most extensive ecclesiastical networks of the early medieval world, and was, on balance, a product of the trade. Nestorian Christianity shared the oasis cities with a remarkable variety of other faiths — Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism among them — and the relative tolerance of these cosmopolitan hubs made the church’s long eastward march possible. I have always thought the standard picture of these oasis cities as multi-faith “stopping points” is correct in spirit but undersells how thoroughly mixed the populations actually were; a single household in Turfan in the eighth century might have a Buddhist chapel, a Manichaean father-in-law, and a Zoroastrian neighbour.
The Church of the East is, of the five religions, the one least remembered today.
The Nestorian Stele
The single most important documentary source for the history of the Church of the East in China is the Nestorian Stele, a limestone monument erected in 781 CE at the site of a Christian monastery in the Tang capital Chang’an. The stele, which stands about 2.4 meters tall (roughly 9 feet in the old measures), bears a long Chinese-language inscription that commemorates the arrival of the religion in China in 635 CE, describes the translation of Christian scriptures into Chinese, and recounts the imperial support the religion received in the early Tang. The text is composed in classical Chinese with heavy use of Buddhist vocabulary — a fact that has, I think, been read too literally; the Buddhist terms were the lingua franca of Tang religious translation, not a sign of doctrinal confusion.
The stele describes the missionary Aluoben as arriving in Chang’an in 635 CE, being received by the emperor Taizong, and being permitted to translate Christian texts and establish a monastery. The inscription was composed by the Syriac-speaking priest Adam (Jingjing in Chinese), who had been appointed bishop of China in 781. The stele was buried, by tradition, in 845 CE during the Buddhist-led persecution of foreign religions under the Tang emperor Wuzong, and was rediscovered in 1623 or 1625 by Jesuit missionaries, who used it as evidence of the antiquity of Christianity in China. The stele is now housed in the Beilin Museum (the Forest of Steles Museum) in Xi’an, in a small purpose-built hall near the south gate. A point that is often missed: the Jesuits who dug it up were not, primarily, doing antiquarian research; they were looking for ammunition for the Chinese Rites Controversy, and the stele served their purposes because its text did not obviously endorse or condemn the ancestral rites the Jesuits were defending.
A personal note
I have used “Nestorian Christianity” and “Church of the East” interchangeably, as most modern scholarship does. Strictly, the older usage of “Nestorian” is a pejorative term imposed by the church’s enemies, and “Church of the East” or “East Syrian Christianity” is preferred. The reader should know that this is a politically loaded vocabulary. The community itself used neither term.
Further reading
- Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012). The single best modern overview.
- The relevant chapter of The Cambridge History of Inner Asia (Cambridge, multiple dates).
- One article from a recent issue of Central Asiatic Journal or Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO) for current scholarship.
- Susan Whitfield, ed., The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith (British Library, 2018) for the British Library’s own primary-source scholarship.