Over a thousand years separate the parallel lives of two men who were each, in very different ways, important Christian leaders of their time. The two held very similar offices but in circumstances that had radically, tragically altered through the years. Placing the two lives side by side gives us a lesson about the sweep of Christian history outside the West.
In my book The Lost History of Christianity, I described the great Eastern churches that continued to flourish through the Middle Ages, usually while living under the power of Islamic regimes. Chiefly based in what is now Iraq and Turkey, they maintained a dazzling network of spiritual and intellectual centers far above anything to be found in contemporary Western Europe.
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