The Early Medieval Era · c. 635-845 · Persia, Central Asia, Tang China
The Church of the East on the Silk Road
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About This Movement
A Syriac-speaking church whose bishops sat in Persia had, by the seventh century, sent monks the whole width of Asia: in 635 a missionary the Chinese records call Alopen reached the Tang capital of Chang'an and was received at the imperial court, and toleration for his religion was proclaimed three years later. What that mission looked like is known mostly through a handful of extraordinary survivals — above all a stone stele erected in 781, inscribed in both Chinese and Syriac, narrating a century and a half of what it calls the Luminous Religion in China, and caches of Christian manuscripts recovered at Dunhuang and Turfan. Between those bright points lie long silences, and much of what is said about the stretches in between is reconstruction rather than record. The reach closes visibly in 845, when an imperial edict aimed at foreign religions ordered clergy out of their monasteries and the Chinese church stops appearing in the sources. Though the same communion carried on in Persia and Central Asia.
Sources
- Xi'an ('Nestorian') Stele, 781 CE — trans. in M. Nicolini-Zani, The Luminous Way to the East (OUP, 2022) (primary) — The community's own public self-presentation in Tang China (history, theology, imperial patronage). Newly annotated English translation in Nicolini-Zani; older full translation in P. Y. Saeki, The Nestorian Documents and Relics in China (1937), on archive.org.
- Dunhuang and Turfan Christian ('Jingjiao') texts — trans. in Nicolini-Zani, The Luminous Way to the East (OUP, 2022) (primary) — The Chinese-language Christian texts themselves (sutras, hymns, catechetical documents) - spectacular surviving fragments. Nicolini-Zani gives the current richly annotated English translations of the Tang-era corpus.
- Timothy I, Apology before the Caliph al-Mahdi (trans. A. Mingana, Woodbrooke Studies 2, 1928) (primary) — Patriarchal inside voice of the church that ran the Silk Road missions (Timothy I, r. 780-823); free online at tertullian.org. His letters also report missions to Turks and Tibetans; the critical edition (Heimgartner, CSCO) is Syriac with German translation only, with no complete English translation.
- Wilhelm Baum & Dietmar W. Winkler, The Church of the East: A Concise History (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) (secondary) — The standard one-volume English history of the whole tradition, including the Central Asian and Chinese expansion. Fills the long silent stretches with the institutional frame.
- Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 3, ch. 3: 'Beyond empire I: Eastern Christianities from the Persian to the Turkish conquest, 604-1071' (Igor Dorfmann-Lazarev) (reference) — Chapter title and author from the vol. 3 TOC (Noble & Smith, 2008). The era's reference-tradition anchor for the eastern churches beyond Byzantium.