NESTORIAN MERCHANT MISSIONARIES AND
TODAY’S UNREACHED PEOPLE GROUPS
A Paper
Presented
at the National Meeting
of the Evangelical Missiological Society
Howard D. Owens
Th.M., New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, 2003
M.Div., Columbia International University, 1988
B.S., Georgia Institute of Technology, 1980
Minneapolis, Minnesota
September 22-24, 2005
Travel well girt like merchants,
That we may gain the world.
Convert men to me,
Fill creation with teaching.
A Syriac hymn quoted by Richard C. Foltz,
Religions of the Silk Road, 62.
1Andrew F. Walls, “Eusebius Tries Again: Recovering the Study of Christian History,”
International Bulletin of Missionary Research, 24,3 (July 2001) : 110.
2John Foster, The Church in the T’ang Dynasty (London: Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge, 1939), vii.
1
Introduction
I was a missionary in France. “Why,” you may ask, “do I bother with a study of Nestorian
merchant missionaries?” The answer is simple. While the history of the eastward expansion of
Christianity from Jerusalem is overshadowed by what students of missions know about the
westward spread, the size of the church in Europe paled in comparison to the breadth of the
church in Asia.
If the church in Asia reached such a scale, many Asians must have become Christians. Andrew
F. Walls asserted that “the eastward spread of the Christian faith across Asia is still more
remarkable than the westward spread across Europe.”1 John Foster made a similar point when he
wrote, “Those who serve the Church in the East ought to have in the foreground of their thoughts
a Church which was always universal, and which from the days of the Apostles onwards was
always advancing eastwards. Western Church history will then take up its rightful place as a
useful, indeed an indispensable, background.”2 I wonder, therefore, if Christendom is in the
process of becoming deChristianized, was not Asia first deChristianized?
An appropriate objection to such pronouncements would be to ask, “Where is this church
today?” One must readily concede that the regions east of Jerusalem are inhabited by some of the
2
most unreached peoples of the present world. If, however, the spread of Christianity eastward
was as extensive as some writers assert, who carried the gospel to Asia and were not some of the
ancestors of these peoples “reached” at some point? How one responds to these questions has
implications on contemporary missiology.
The Nestorian Church in Asia
In search of an answer to these questions, I will examine the missionary efforts of Nestorian
missionaries. Their church has been variously known as the Syrian Church, the Nestorian Church,
or the Church of the East. The latter will be avoided to preclude confusion with the Eastern
Orthodox Church. These missionaries were largely from Syria, Persia, and Sogdiana.
As I progress through this inquiry, you will discover that, first, the primary actors in the
spread of the gospel were merchant missionaries. These missionaries, who combined their
business with their Christian mission, hardly resembled a contemporary missionary. They lacked
ties to mission sending structures and to their sending churches that today’s missionaries enjoy.
These merchant missionaries must have appeared more as lay Christians who had a zeal for
sharing their faith along the trade routes of Asia. Second, you will consider the impact these
missionaries, along with their clerical and monastic colleagues, had on some of the people groups
which are unreached today.
Nestorian Christology
When students of church history read of the Nestorian church, they probably think immediately
of Christological controversies. A theologian named Nestorius, from whom the Nestorian
church got its name, has been suspected of diminishing Christ’s deity. Due to the limitations of
3
3Paul E. Pierson, “Nestorian Mission,” Evangelical Dictionary of World Missions, Scott A.
Moreau, gen. ed. (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2000), 675. C. Gordon Olson considered the
Nestorian view to be “weaker than the ‘orthodox’ view.” C. Gordon Olson, What in the World is
God Doing? The Essentials of Global Missions: An Introductory Guide (Cedar Knolls: Global
Gospel Publishers, 2003), 102.
4Paula Harris recalled that these theological debates were taking place “in multiple
communities and in translation to multiple languages.” Paula Harris, “Nestorian Community,
Spirituality, and Mission” in Global Missiology for the Twenty-First Century, ed. William D.
Taylor (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000), 496.
5Alphonse Mingana, The Early Spread of Christianity in Central Asia and the Far East: A
New Document (Manchester: University Press, 1925), 41.
this present study, the author will be unable to explore this debate. He, nonetheless, feels justified
in proceeding with the development of his thesis. Today, it does not appear that Nestorius was as
heterodox as was once thought. Paul E. Pierson, in his article in the Evangelical Dictionary of
World Missions, “Nestorian Mission,” stated that Nestorius’ “Christology was probably orthodox,
although perhaps not stated adequately.”3 Maintaining an unorthodox faith is far worse than being
able to express accurately orthodox faith.4 Due to the limitations of this paper, I will proceed by
accepting that the Nestorians, as merchant missionaries, preached an unadulterated gospel.
In the Russian province of Semiryechensk, located in southern Siberia, were discovered
Nestorian gravestones. In this cemetery, interred side by side, were the earthly bodies of
individuals who had come from China, India, East and West Turkestan, Mongolia and Manchuria,
Siberia, and Persia. The ethnic variety of these Nestorians allows one to suspect, as Alphonse
Mingana suggested, that peoples across Asia were in constant dialogue.5 They lived in an age
when the church was planted in Asia. They lived in the age of the Nestorian merchant missionary.
4
6Richard C. Foltz, Religions of the Silk Road (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 7.
7Ibid. Foltz considered the context of Central Asia to be pluralistic, precluding the possibility
of finding monolithic religious traditions across the continent. He nonetheless described the
conversion of “hundreds of thousands among the Eurasian steppe peoples . . . [to Nestorianism,
which] appears centuries later like a bad dream to the first Catholic missionaries in China, who
found it comfortably entrenched there as the recognized resident Christianity of the East.” Foltz,
8. While Christianity may adopt local forms which may lessen a sense of homogeneity on first
view, the pluralism of these cultures did not exclude the possibility of attaching oneself to a
particular faith over and against another.
Merchant Missionaries
Richard C. Foltz, in his Religions of the Silk Roads, told “the story of how religions accompanied
merchants and their goods along the overland Asian trade routes of pre-modern times.”6
His thesis included three elements. First, he argued that ideas and trade were in continuous motion
along the trade routes of Asia. He suggested that just as merchants managed a mixed inventory of
imported or exported merchandise, so the people of Asia adhered to a melange of local and
foreign religious beliefs. He allowed that other factors attributed to the spread of religious faiths
in Asia. He insisted, however, that trade was the main facilitator.7 How were the merchants of
these days able to wed business and missions?
Business and missions is the theme of the present meeting of the Evangelical Missiological
Society. The theme may cover tentmaking as the means by which cross-cultural workers support
themselves. This tentmaker would be akin to a bi-vocational worker. The theme may also cover
the scenario of missionaries who use their business activities to justify their presence in countries
which restrict the legal entry of traditional missionaries. In the case of Nestorian merchant
missionaries, they appeared less like traditional missionaries. They were Christians who supported
themselves by their business and who had a zeal for sharing their faith.
5
8Acts 2:9.
9John Stewart, Nestorian Missionary Enterprise (Edinburgh: T. and T. Clark, 1928), xxvxxvii.
Foltz, 1.
10Foltz, 31-32.
11Ibid., 64-65.
Merchant Missionaries and the Day of Pentecost
The Parthian converts of Pentecost were the first of these Asian merchant missionaries.
Christianity began to spread among the Jewish diaspora in Asia. Luke recorded in Acts that the
Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, who were in Jerusalem for Pentecost, were among the first
converts to Christianity.8 John Stewart believed that these men and women were either Jews or
Jewish proselytes. These Asian converts were most likely merchants.9
Foltz argued that the Jews of the Persian diaspora turned to commerce for their livelihoods.
He wrote, “[They] set up networks with relatives or other Judeans in other parts of the Persian
Empire or elsewhere. . . . By the Parthian period, both Palestinian and Babylonian Jews were
involved in the silk trade of China . . . Because Jews were spread across a wide geographic area
spanning both the Parthian and the Roman lands, they were ideally situated to participate in trade
between the two empires.”10 Given that the Christian faith was spread among Jews first, and given
that the contacts that the Jews had with other peoples were essentially mercantile, Foltz later
reasoned, “it can safely be said that Christianity’s first link with the Silk Road was via the
Babylonian Jews.”11 As with the Nestorian merchant missionary, the Jewish convert to
6
12Foltz argued that their evangelism naturally followed their business. Their clients became
familiar with both their Christianity and their commodities. Foltz, 35. While Foltz’s comments are
beneficial for the present writer, he does take exception with other theses proposed by Foltz. For
example, Foltz proposed that Persian influences were present in Jewish postexilic scripture. He
argued that Ezekiel and Daniel borrowed their eschatologies from Persian beliefs. Foltz, 32.
13Per Beskow, “Mission, Trade and Emigration in the Second Century,” Svensk Exegetisk
Årsbok 35 (1970) : 108.
Christianity did not conceive of his business as a facade for his missionary activity. His livelihood
depended upon his business and not upon his evangelistic ministry.12
Merchant Missionaries and the Early Church
Per Beskow, writing in Svensk Exegetisk Årsbok, argued that Christian merchants continued
to be the primary reason for the expansion of the Church in the second century. He explained that
the spread of the Christian gospel was facilitated by a generally westward movement of
merchandise and the westward emigration of Eastern populations, the Jewish diaspora, and the
exchange of Christian slaves. “In both of these contexts,” he concluded, “Asia Minor and Syria
are of primary importance during the second century. . . . Asia Minor and Syria were immensely
rich and sent their merchants and ships around the Mediterranean with Oriental products.”
Beskow believed that, as incredibly as the thought may seem to the reader, merchant missionaries
from Asia may have founded and provided the majority membership of the church in Gaul.13
Eckhard Schnabel, in History of Early Christian Mission, demurred on Beskow’s insistence
that Christian traders and the commerce of Christian slaves were the only explanations for the
growth of the church in this period. Schnabel countered that Beskow based his reasoning uniquely
on the absence of historical testimony supporting other explanations, such as “the sending of
7
14Eckhard Schnabel, Paul and the Early Church, vol. 2, Early Christian Mission (Downers
Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 1555.
15Foltz, 62.
16Harris, 497.
missionaries to foreign regions.”14 If the merchant missionaries were not the only traveling
Christian evangelists publishing the gospel of Jesus Christ in other lands, they certainly played a
significant role as the church spread to the west and to the east.
Nestorian Merchant Missionaries
Like the Jews before them, Persians who had placed their faith in Christ, were merchants. The
close relationship between the business of Nestorian Christians and their missionary activity is
confirmed by the metaphorical meaning of “merchants.” Foltz noted that in Syriac, the language
of the Persians, the word for merchant, tgr’, was often used as a synonym for a Persian missionary.
A fourth century Syriac hymn included the following stanza:
Travel well girt like merchants,
That we may gain the world.
Convert men to me,
Fill creation with teaching.15
The clergy of the Nestorian church also could be found among traders of their day. Paula
Harris, who presented a thoroughly researched paper on the missionary heritage of the Nestorian
church at the 1999 World Evangelical Fellowship’s missiological meetings in Brazil, explained
that the Nestorian missionary model included both the professional missionary and the lay
missionary.16 One may conclude that the professional missionaries were fully supported by their
ministry activities. Stewart would not agree. He explained that the Nestorian church lacked the
8
17Stewart, 5.
18Mingana believed that Addai was Thaddaeus, one of Christ’s twelve disciples. Mingana, 8.
Moffett believed Addai was one of the Seventy in Lk 10:1-24. Samuel Hugh Moffett, A History
of Christianity in Asia, vol. 1, Beginnings to 1500 (San Francisco: Harper, 1992), 33.
19Bosch did not include in his “Missionary Paradigm of the Eastern Church” the role played
by the merchant missionary. He accredited the spread of Christianity in Asia via Nestorian
missions to Nestorian “monasticism, theology, and mission.” David Bosch, Transforming
Mission: Paradigm Shifts in Theology of Mission (Maryknoll, Orbis Books: 1991), 204.
20Pierson, 675.
21Mingana, 39.
structure to provide for the material needs of its clergy. The Nestorian bishops supported
themselves as Paul did through his tentmaking activities. They were merchants, carpenters,
blacksmiths, and weavers. With humor, Stewart recalled how “sacerdotalists” objected that “the
merchant could with ease lay aside his calling and become a monk or presbyter, and vice versa.”17
According to Mingana, some of the original priests in Persia were ordained by one “Aggai, a
maker of silks, the disciple of Addai.”18 They were merchants from the start.19
Paul E. Pierson believed that these merchant missionaries, teamed with their monastic and
cleric counterparts, formed “one of the most passionately missionary branches of the church.”20
Mingana considered the Persians to be the most “virile element” of the Nestorian missionary
movement.21 These Christians had the character to persevere through difficulty, the training to
transmit the gospel message, and the social networks to encounter the men and women who had
not yet heard of the Savior from Nazareth. These missionaries took the gospel to the extremities
of Asia.
9
22Foltz, 12-13.
23Ibid., 68.
24Ibid., 47.
25Mingana, 7.
26Foltz, 15.
Sogdian Nestorian Merchant Missionaries
The Sogdians were the primary actors in this merchant missionary paradigm of the church in
Asia. Foltz considered them to be the middle-men of trade and ideas.22 “Sogdian merchants were
the real masters of the Silk Road, whoever the ephemeral powers of the time might be. Under the
rule of their fellow Iranian peoples, the Parthian and the Sasanians, Sogdian merchants moved
easily in the Iranian lands to the west, where some of them were won over to the Christian
message, just as other Sogdians, active in the former Kushan lands, had embraced Buddhism.”23
Admittedly the Sogdians did not persist in their Christian faith. They were attracted to
Manichaeism at the same time as Nestorian Chrisianity. Earlier they had been converts to
Buddhism. As Foltz related their shifting faith, he insinuated a naive attitude in the Sogdians
towards different faiths. Foltz allowed that the Sogdians never embraced Buddhism as a people,
while he insisted that they were the primary Buddhist messengers east of their land.24 If the
Sogdians adopted Christianity in the late second century, the time during which an ancient Syriac
document was written attesting to the presence of Christians among the Bactarians,25 their
Nestorian baptism came at least four hundred years after their encounter with Buddhism. They
remained a Christian people until the eighth century, when they turned to Islam.26 The Sogdians
could have been a Christian people for between five and six hundred years. While their later
10
27Ibid., 13.
28Ibid., 68. Syriac is often considered the language of the Nestorian church. Foltz explained
the difference between Syriac and Sogdian. Syriac served as the language of the priest and
Sogdian served as the language of the missionary.
abandonment of Christianity was complete, they were hardly flippant believers. Before their
conversion to Islam, the Sogdians, because of their trade relations, were well situated to carry the
Christian gospel along the trade routes of Asia.
The commerce of the Sogdians benefitted from a system of trails and roads which crisscrossed
Asia. This system of overland trade routes was later called the Silk Roads. These itineraries were
so denominated because of the predominance of the silk trade on these roads which connected
Rome and China. The Nestorians established their churches in towns that lined these roads.
While there is much to contrast between Western and Eastern missions, they shared one
common element: Antioch. Antioch was connected to the Roman Roads and the Silk Roads.
From Antioch, Paul traveled into Asia Minor or Europe by traveling on Roman Roads, or by
boarding a Roman ship. Nestorian missionaries, from Antioch, took the Silk Roads into Asia.
Foltz considered the Sogdians to be the most successful merchants of Asian trade and as such,
“the major link connecting East and West.”27 Their ability to transmit the story of Christ, while
they caravanned across Asia, was enhanced by their language, Sogdian. Sogdian was the Greek
language of Asia. As the lingua franca for trade relations, Sogdian was the language of choice for
the merchant missionaries as they traded their wares and communicated the gospel with their
clients and associates.28 The Sogdians also learned the languages of other Asian peoples as they
had opportunity to trade with them. Their language abilities enabled them to serve as interpreters
and translators. Sogdians were the primary translators of Buddhist, Christian, and Manichaeistic
11
29Foltz, 13. Foltz related how Nestorian missionaries of Persia taught the Turks the art of
writing. Foltz, 69.
30Adolf Harnack, The Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, trans. James
Moffatt (New York: Williams and Norgate, 1905), 294.
31Mingana, 5-6.
texts. Foltz asserted that Sogdian translators were behind the translations of religious texts “from
Indian Prakrits (vernacular dialects), Aramaic, or Parthian into Bactrian, Tokharian, Khotanese,
Turkish, or Chinese, either via Sogdian or directly.”29 These merchant missionaries were ideally
suited for cross-cultural ministry because of their language skills.
Training Nestorian Merchant Missionaries
Nestorian merchant missionaries benefitted equally from the training they received in
Nestorian monasteries. The Nestorians had two primary schools, one at Edessa and the other at
Arbel. Edessa’s importance to Nestorian missions is unquestionable. Adolf Harnack, in The
Expansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries, described it as the headquarters of
Nestorian missions and the nucleus of Syrian Christianity in the third century. From Edessa,
Syrian Christian literature was disseminated. The Christian population even exceeded every other
city of its day prior to Constantine. But it was no more than “an oasis.” Harnack believed that
“round it swarmed the heathen.”30
East of the Tigris, Arbel was the second missionary center. It was the capital of the province
of Adiabene. Mingana located the origin of the church’s spread deeper into Asia at Arbel. He
proposed that the missionary significance of neither city paled in light of the other city.31
Nestorians were trained for three years in one of these schools, after which they departed to carry
12
32Stewart attested to the presence of “hundreds of monasteries in the land of Persia.”
Stewart, 46.
33Stewart, 37.
34Assemmani, Bibliotheca Orientalis 3, pt 2 : 941, quoted in Stewart, 39.
the message of Christ to the ends of the earth. Some established new monasteries in the lands of
their sojourn.32 The new monasteries became new Nestorian training centers.
These monasteries were the educational institutions for Nestorian children and youths. The
primary subject of these schools was the Scriptures. While these schools were tuition free, per se,
the parents were expected to provide a portion of the Nestorian monks’ compensation. The
students sought employment during their summer vacations to provide for themselves.33 Future
merchant missionaries were among the students in such schools. Aspiring merchants “were
expected to study the Psalms, the New Testament, and to attend courses of lectures before
entering on a business career.”34
Ascetic Nestorian Merchant Missionaries
As merchants, the Nestorian Christians sought to maintain lucrative businesses. The future of
their work and their own livelihoods depended upon profitable trades. Their desire for material
gain must have been counterbalanced by the ascetism of their school masters, the Nestorian
monks. Alphonse Mingana related the tale of the Bishop of Arran who was accompanied by four
presbyters and two laymen to the country of the Turks. They began their journey after the bishop
had received a commission in a vision to evangelize Byzantine prisoners. Their daily rations
13
35Mingana, “Early Spread of Christianity,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 9 : 303,
quoted in Stewart, 81-82.
36Foltz, 9.
37Samuel Hugh Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, vol. 1, Beginnings to 1500 (San
Francisco, CA: Harper, 1992), 77-78. Bosch also contrasted Nestorian missionary asceticism with
Egyptian isolated asceticism. Bosch, 204.
consisted of a loaf of bread and a jar of water for each.35 The merchants and missionaries who
traveled the roads of Asia had to be accustomed to surviving on such meager sustenance.
The merchants would join a caravan for the trip to distant markets. Caravan members enjoyed
a degree of safety due to the size of the traveling entourage and due to an eventual military escort.
The caravan’s professional guides knew the optimum routes for each journey.36 Caravans still did
not provide a trip of leisure. Merchant missionaries who were acquainted with the asceticism of a
Nestorian monk possessed the stamina to survive the journey.
Often one may associate isolation from the activities and cares of the world with the life of the
ascetic. If Samuel Hugh Moffett is correct, this impression originated from the reputation of the
Egyptian ascetic, not the Nestorian ascetic missionary. In contrast to the ascetic tradition of
Egypt, Moffett explained, “Syria . . . , with its travel and trading traditions, stressed mobility and
outreach. Its ascetics became wandering missionaries, healing the sick, feeding the poor, and
preaching the gospel as they moved from place to place.”37 Such missionaries brought the gospel
to the Asian peoples of their age.
14
38Mingana, 5.
39Foltz, 66-67.
40Abu Rayhan Biruni, Chronology of Ancient Nations, trans. E. Sachau (Lahore: Hijra
International, 1983), 282; quoted in Foltz, 67.
Nestorian Merchant Missionaries and Today’s
Unreached People Groups of Asia
Mingana argued that the Persian missionaries, many of whom were merchants, worked to
thoroughly convert the peoples they encountered. He wrote, “From the third century down to the
time of Chingis [sic] Khan, the activity of the East-Syrian and Persian converts to Christianity
slowly but surely worked to diminish the immense influence of the priests of the hundred and one
cults of Central Asia, the most important of whom were the mobeds of Zoroastrianism and the
wizards of Shamanism.”38 Foltz concurred that Christianity in Central Asia was “on the verge of
displacing Zoroastrianism, on the popular level.”39 A Muslim scholar of the eleventh century, Abu
Rayhan Biruni, wrote that “the majority of the inhabitants of Syria, Iraz, and Khurasan [were]
Nestorians.”40 The Nestorians, at least before their decline, would not blend elements of their
Christianity with those of another faith. When the Nestorians met these peoples, they sought to
win them to Christianity.
The Keraits
The ancestors of the Uighurs were one of the peoples among whom the Nestorians worked
when their church spread across Asia. They live today in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous
Region in Northwest China. The Nestorian missionaries, while working in Central Asia, worked
among the Turkic Kerait tribe, the ancestors of the Uighurs.
15
41This story is recorded in a 1009 C.E. letter written by a Nestorian metropolitan to the
Nestorian Patriarch, John. Mingana, 14-16. See also Foltz, 70.
42Moffett, 400.
43Pierson, 675.
In 1007 C.E., the ruler of the nomadic Keraits was hunting at a high altitude and was
surprised by a sudden snowstorm. He lost all hope of returning to his camp. While despairing, he
saw a vision of a saint, who said to him, “If you believe in Christ, I will lead you to the right
direction, and you will not die here.” He gave his allegiance to Christ. After regaining his camp,
he summoned the Nestorian merchants who were also in the camp, to seek their advice
concerning Christianity. They emphasized his need to be baptized and they gave him one of the
Gospels, which he read on a daily basis. They also taught him the Lord’s prayer. The Kerait chief
requested that a priest be sent to his tribe to baptize him and the two hundred thousand souls who
had followed him to faith in Christ.41 Moffett asserted that “during the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries the whole tribe was considered Christian.”42 Of the Keraits, Paul E. Pierson stated that
“in the eighth century their language was reduced to writing.” He does not say it explicitly, but
the scriptures may have been translated, knowing the practice of the Nestorians. Pierson goes on
to say that this “was passed to the Mongols.”43 He alluded certainly to the Kerait orthography,
and perhaps to the scriptures as well.
The Taklimakan Uighur and Lop Uighur
The Taklimakan Uighur and the Uighur Lop Nur are two other unreached people groups of
East Asia. They too were in contact with the Nestorians. The latter are descendants of the
“ancient Loulan people,” who lived at the Lake Lop Nur. When it dried up, they had to move to
16
44Paul Hattaway, Operation China: Introducing all the Peoples of China (Pasadena: William
Carey, 2000), 529.
45Ibid., 530.
46Ibid., 363, 564.
Miran. Their contact with the gospel was through the Nestorian missionaries who “established
churches in the villages along the Silk Road” between the eighth and thirteenth centuries.44 The
Taklimakan Uighur live today as a remote tribe in the Taklimakan Desert. Until 1990, when they
were “discovered,” they had lived in isolation for 350 years. Soon after their discovery, Nestorian
manuscripts were uncovered nearby in the Dunhuang Oasis. At some point the inhabitants of this
region, if not the ancestors of today’s Taklimakan Uighur, were in the proximity of Nestorian
missionaries. Today though, they are “the epitome of an unevangelized people group.”45
Other People Groups
Nestorian missionaries, whether lay or clergy, influenced other people groups who are
considered to be unreached today. The reader has already met the missionary band of a bishop,
four presbyters, and two laymen who subsisted on a loaf of bread and a jar of water each day and
preached the gospel to Byzantine prisoners, who were among the Turks. Nestorian missionaries
evangelized the Mongols, the You Tai, the Central Tibetans, and the Sarikoli Tajiks. The
Mongols at times were on the verge of embracing Christianity as a tribe. Nestorian missionaries
won many Mongol converts between the seventh and fourteenth centuries. You Tai are Chinese
Jews, who migrated to China between 500 and 1000 C.E. When Marco Polo passed through
China, he found them among Nestorian Christians.46 Concerning another group, the Nestorian
patriarch in Baghdad, Timothy (778-820), referred to the presence of Christians in Tibet and
17
47Arthur Christopher Moule and Paul Pelliot, Marco Polo: The Description of the World, 2
Vols. (London: Routledge, 1938), 143; quoted in Hattaway, Operation China, 511.
48Hattaway, 498.
49Mt 28:19.
expressed his willingness to send a missionary to them.47 And finally, today’s Sarikoli Tajiks are
descendants of the Persians. Before the arrival of Islam in the tenth century, most Persians were
Christians.48 Are Sarikoli Tajiks the sons and daughters of these missionaries who originally
brought the gospel to the peoples of Asia?
Nestorian Merchant Missionaries and Post-Christian Peoples
One result of recognizing the significance of the work of Nestorian missionaries in Asia,
whether they were clergy or merchants, is that the church of today is returning to where it was
once planted. Based on the preceding examples of peoples reached by the Nestorians, these
peoples are post-Christian, even if ancient post-Christian. The criteria of apocalyptic group
representation is met, as is the criteria of group accountability.
The Criteria for Missions to Unreached People Groups
Paul Hattaway used these two criteria as he presented a case for the nearly 500 unreached
people groups that he catalogued in Operation China. He first established that when Christ
commanded the disciples to “go and make disciples of all nations,”49 the Lord envisioned the
nations to be the ethnolinguistic people groups of the world. Hattaway then considered the scene
18
50Rev. 5:9, 7:9. While conference participants and the writer discussed the themes raised in
this paper at the South Central Regional meeting of the EMS in New Orleans, March 12, 2005,
Mike Pocock astutely observed that in Rev. 7:9 the apocalyptic seer referred to the redeemed
representatives of the world’s people groups who came “out of the great tribulation.” The writer
afterwards added the reference to Rev. 5:9, for this multitude “from every tribe and language and
people and nation” is the universal collective of men and women whom the Lamb purchased with
his blood.
51Hattaway, 6.
52Mt 24:14.
53Hattaway, 6.
in Revelation of a multitude present before the throne of Christ from “every tribe, tongue, and
nation.”50 He stated:
If the ultimate aim of God is to redeem individuals from among every ethnic and linguistic
representation of humankind on the earth, then everything must be done to learn who those
people are so that the church may do everything in their power to see them won for Christ.
This appears to be of such importance in the Scriptures that the final sign of the imminent
Second Coming of Christ is linked to the completion of this task: “And this gospel of the
Kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations (ethnae), and then
the end will come.51
Hattaway began with the necessity that the gospel be announced, so as to insure the
comprehensive representation of all peoples before the throne of Christ. He established next the
accountability criteria for the preaching of the kingdom. After the gospel has been preached as a
testimony to an ethnolinguistic people group, the group becomes responsible for how it responds
to the gospel.52 He concluded, “In places like China there are whole races of people who have
never had the opportunity to hear the gospel. Not only are these lost individuals, but they are lost
ethnic representations of humankind.”53
Hattaway pled with Christians to recognize the value that each of these peoples has in “God’s
sight.” And rightly so. However, because of what has now been demonstrated, to say that some of
19
these ethnic groups are without representation before the throne of God is difficult to defend. For
one, a number of these groups were reached at some point in time. Second, the criteria of
accountability also has been fulfilled as the gospel was preached “as a testimony” to some of these
groups, or at least to their ancestors.
Ancient and Recent Post-Christian Peoples
Having recognized the contribution made by the Nestorian merchant missionaries to insure the
representation of the peoples of Asia before Christ’s throne and their accountability for the
gospel, the first needed adjustment is with terminology. Some of these peoples must no longer be
considered pre-Christian, at least based on how these passages in Matthew have been understood
and how “nation” has been defined. According to this understanding, some of the groups must at
least be seen as ancient post-Christian. The church is now going back to this continent to
evangelize these groups again because of how precious they are in the “sight of God,” to borrow
Hattaway’s words.
Denominating these groups as ancient post-Christian will enable a more instructive
comparison to be made with the recent post-Christian people of the West. Christianity in a
civilization once known as Christendom is in the process of waning, as happened to the Nestorian
Church in Asia. Perhaps this deChristianization is happening for similar reasons. Future study
based on a recognition of the similarities between the two situations will facilitate a better
understanding of the scriptural mandate for missions on one hand, and a more realistic
understanding of the history of the expansion of Christianity on the other. Post-Christian peoples
must be understood in light of the scriptures. What missionary mandate remains for them?
20
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