Page 12 - Christianity among the Arabs

employment among the Turks and Huns. It needs to be noted that the Christians in the
Sassanian kingdom were chiefly from the Syriac speaking population of the empire. In
Mesopotamia most physicians, the larger portion of the mercantile and artisan classes
and many members of the civil bureaucracy appeared to have been Christians. In the
middle of the sixth century, a priest of the Hephthalite Huns was consecrated as bishop

for his people by the Nestorian Catholicos. (R. Aubrey Vine, The Nestorian Churches: A
Concise History of Nestorian Christianity in Asia from the Persian Schism to the
Modern Assyrians. London. Independent Press, 1937, p.62.)

From the fourth to the seventh century, Merv was an important missionary base from
which mission was undertaken to Central Asia. From Men’, the urban centres of
Bukhara and Samarquand in Transoxiana were reached with the Gospel. Mingana
speaks of a large number of converts beyond the Oxus river as a result of missionary
work undertaken by Elliya, the metropolitan of Men' in the seventh century. (Lawrence
E. Browne, The Eclipse of Christianity in Asia. New York: Cambridge University Press,
1933.) In due course Samarquand became an important Christian centre and a base for
missionary expansion further eastwards. About the Christian community in
Samarquand, Wilfred Blunt writes:

The Christian community there, like that found in many Central Asian
countries, included at different times Jacobite (Syriac Christians of the
Syrian Orthodox Church), Melkites (Syriac Christians of the Greek rites) and
Armenians (of the Armenian Apostolic Church). But as early as the fifth
century, it was an important 'Nestorian centre’, and by the eighth century,
continuing until the fifteenth century, had its own metropolitan. (Wilfred
Blunt, The Golden Road to Samarkand, London, Hamish Hamilton. 1973.
Quoted in John C. England, op. cit., p.137.)

Many members of this church of the East lived often in village settlements, and
remains of Nestorian Christian villages north of Samarquand date from at least as early
as the ninth century. They were active in trade, education, and medical occupations,
and drew freely on the scholarship and traditions of the East Syrian Church with which
they appear to have been in regular contact.

Like other communities also, Samarquand retained its churches, schools
and monastic cells under a succession of Arab and Turkish rulers for almost
1000 years, the Samarquand Churches surviving even the Mongol invasion
of 1220. In 1248, an Armenian visitor to Samarquand attended worship
there and Marco Polo estimated one in every ten to be Christians at the time
of his visit (c 1265). In the mid-thirteenth century also, church buildings were
restored and used, new churches were built, one of circular structure,
dedicated to John the Baptist, and 200 years later Lopez de Clavijo reported
the presence there of many Christians. (Ibid, p. 139.)

Timothy I was one of the energetic patriarchs of the Persian church. He had sent more
than eighty monks for mission work in Turkestan (a region in Central Asia extending
approximately from the Caspian Sea to Lake Baikal). In the 8th century, the number of
Turkish Christians had increased so much that Patriarch Timothy, in about AD 781,
consecrated a metropolitan for them. It is also mentioned incidentally in one of his
letters that he was about to consecrate a metropolitan for Tibet. Browne comments
that these references are tantalizing because they show that there must have been
great missions of which we have no record. (Lawrence Browne, op. cit, p.95.)

There were Nestorian missionary activities further to the northeast, toward Lake
Baikal. During the 10th and 11th centuries, several Tartar tribes were entirely or to a