Every few days, ISIS militants in the Middle East carry out some new atrocity calculated to inflict shock and awe on Western opinion. They carry out barbarous executions, they destroy priceless items of cultural heritage, all duly filmed, and those acts have their effect worldwide. It’s a sad commentary on global opinion, though, that some of the most savage blows inflicted on the world’s cultural and religious heritage have gained nothing like as much attention. Assyrian sculptures and Greco-Roman temples are irreplaceable monuments of human civilization, but so too are the living churches now being uprooted. Christian communities have almost been obliterated in most of Iraq, and a similar process is underway in large areas of Syria. That humanitarian crisis is familiar enough, but far less understood is the significance of these churches now facing terminal crisis. In their time, they represented not just a distant fringe of Christianity, but its heart and core. Ironically, they decisively shaped the history of Islam, as well as Christianity.
ISIS supporters identify Christian homes with the Arabic letter Nun for Nasrani, Nazarene. That usage takes us back to an era when followers of Jesus were as likely to bear that name as the newer alternative, “Christian.” For centuries, Christians in those regions used the Semitic Syriac language, which is so near to Hebrew and Aramaic. For a millennium, Syriac was one of the great languages of Christian literature, scholarship and devotion, at least equal in significance to Greek and Latin. What we see being before our eyes are the last vestiges of that critical third component of early and medieval Christianity.
Read Full Article »