The so-called 'Nestorian' Church (officially known as the Apostolic Assyrian Church of the East, with its See in Baghdad) was one of the most significant Christian communities to develop east of the Roman Empire. In its heyday the Church had 8 million adherents and stretched from the Mediterranean to China. Christoph Baumer is one of the very few Westerners to have visited many of the most important Assyrian sites and has written the only comprehensive history of the Church, which now fights for survival in its country of origin, Iraq, and is almost forgotten in the West. He narrates its rich and colorful trajectory, from its apostolic beginnings to the present day, and discusses the Church's theology, christology, and uniquely vigorous spirituality. He analyzes the Church's turbulent relationship with other Christian chuches and its dialogue with neighboring world religions such as Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Islam, Buddhism, and Taoism. Richly illustrated with maps and over 150 full-color photographs, the book will be essential reading for those interested in a fascinating, but neglected Christian community which has profoundly shaped the history of civilization in both East and West.

"This extraordinary well-written and exciting book is a thorough and systematic exploration of the spread of early Mesopotamian Christianity and its disputed theology undertaken by a leader of the Church of the East. It is an important historical and patristic study for the self-understanding of the Assyrian Church today. Mar Bawai Soro's scholarship is tightly reasoned and marked by the utmost clarity. Being truthful to the tradition of his Church, the research of Mar Bawai significantly contributes not only to ecumenical encounter but also leads to a better mutual understanding of Fathers, Councils, and Theologies within their respective historical and cultural contexts." (Prof. Dietmar W. Winkler, Chair of the Department of Biblical Studies and Ecclesiastical History, University of Salzburg)

Currently the only complete history in English of the Syriac Church of the East, this work covers the periods of the Sassanians, Arabs, Mongols, Ottomans and the twentieth century.

A collection of papers on the history of Christianity along the Silk Road and in pre-modern China, pushing back the frontier of knowledge in a fast developing new area of research.00The diffusion of Christianity along the Silk Road from Iraq and Iran to China in the pre-modern era has attracted scholarly attention in the West since the discovery of the famous Xi?an (Nestorian) Monument c. 1623. This initial discovery was dismissed as a?Jesuit forgery? by Voltaire, Edward Gibbon and many other scholars of the Enlightenment. However, its authenticity has been more than vindicated by the discovery of genuine (Nestorian / Jingjiao) Christian texts in Chinese from Dunhuang and in Syriac, Sogdian and Old Turkish from Turfan (Bulayïq) at the beginning of the last century. The discovery of a second major inscription which included part of a Chinese Christian (Jingjiao) text already known to scholars from Dunhuang, and the recent re-discovery of several Dunhuang Christian texts in a Japanese library, has removed any lingering doubts about the authenticity of the texts recovered from Dunhuang. The surviving material spans almost a millennium from the introduction of Christianity along the Silk Road in the sixth and seventh centuries through the Mongol period and beyond.

"The cradle of the Church of the East was in Mesopotamia (between the Tigris and the Euphrates), where it developed its first centre at Seleucia-Ctesiphon, then the capital of the great Persian Empire and today an archaeological site to the south of Baghdad. From the very beginnings of Christianity until the fourteenth century, this Church experienced a remarkable expansion in Asia, its missionaries carrying the Gospel from Persia to India, via the Persian Gulf, and even as far as China. The Church of the East reached China as early as the seventh century via Central Asia and the celebrated Silk Road that linked China to the Mediterranean world. Much later, in the late fourteenth century, the invasions of the Mongol conqueror, Timur Lang (Tamerlane), across Asia brought about a great decline of the Church of the East. Eventually, after the genocide suffered by Christians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915, and the massacres that followed in Persia, the Church of the East and its people were on the verge of extinction. In 1940 the patriarchal seat was moved to Chicago (in the United States) and then in September 2015 to Erbil (in northern Iraq). Many of the faithful have left the Middle East and have formed diaspora communities throughout the world. The history of Christianity in the Middle East and well beyond, in Central and Eastern Asia, is very little known. In this book, the reader is invited to travel in time and space and undertake the fascinating discovery of a very ancient apostolic Church, the Church of the East, whose two-thousand year history constitutes an indispensable chapter in the history of the universal Church"--

In the years before the First World War the Church of England maintained a mission of help to the Assyrian Church of the East (popularly known as the Nestorian Church) in its homeland, a corner of eastern Turkey and northwestern Persia. Its ideal was to restore this body to its ancient vitality and its place as an independent branch of the true church. The Mission faced many problems. At home there was the difficulty of justifying support of a "heretical" church. In the field, the confidence of the Assyrians proved difficult to gain, especially in competition with other missions: French Catholic and American Presbyterian. Still, it had notable accomplishments. Archbishop Benson, the founder, strictly ruled out any proselytizing to the Anglican church, and in this respect his Assyrian Mission withstands scrutiny in modern eyes better than some other missions of the Victorian era. The first study to cover this history, Coakley's book will be of interest to scholars concerned with oriental churches and church history, as well as students of Middle Eastern history.

Drawing on his own research in East Germany and relying primarily on sources published in East Germany itself, author John Burgess demonstrates the roots of the church's theology in Barth, Bonhoeffer, and in the Barmen declaration, which in 1934 pronounced Christianity and Nazi ideology to be incompatible.