Phillip Jenkins on Recovering the Ancient Church of the Middle East
Monday, January 19th, 2009
Phillip Jenkins, in an interview with Christianity Today:
(also see his article for CT on recovering the history of the Eastern Church)
[The] Eastern world has a solid claim to be the direct lineal heir of the earliest New Testament Christianity. Throughout their history, the Eastern churches used Syriac, which is close to Jesus’s own language of Aramaic, and they followed Yeshua, not Jesus. Everything about these churches runs so contrary to what we think we know. …
Just a suggestion. Perhaps we should think of these Eastern communities — the Nestorians and Jacobites — as the real survivors of ancient Christianity. In that case, the great Western churches we know, the Catholic and Orthodox, are the “alternative Christianities.”
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