Mertcan Bulak
@MBulak
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Ağustos 2020 tarihinde katıldı
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According to the dominant church tradition, the apostle Thomas first brought the gospel to India. Whatever the case, the oldest Christian communities in India refer to themselves as Thomas Christians, which lends credence to the notion that Thomas reached Kerala in 52 before suffering martyrdom in Chennai some twenty years later.
Reklam
Presiding over these far-flung outposts from his seat in the Mesopotamian city of Seleucia (near what is now Baghdad, Iraq) was the Catholicos, the patriarch of the Church of the East. The most prominent of these patriarchs was Timothy I, who held the position from 780 to 823.
To appreciate the scale of his domain, consider that by the early ninth century England had two Catholic bishops, one in York and one in Canterbury. At the same point in history, Timothy presided over nineteen metropolitans and eighty-five bishops, including a bishop in the rugged mountains of Tibet.
Various Christian movements, namely the Syriac-speaking Nestorian church of the Persian Empire (which considered itself simply the Church of the East) and the Coptic-speaking Miaphysite churches of Egypt, broke communion with both Rome and Constantinople over fine doctrinal points of Christology. In time, these non-Chalcedonian expressions of Christianity exploded eastward and southward: Nestorian missionaries set out from eastern Syria along the Silk Road while Miaphysites established links with Christian communities along the Nile.
Alopen (c. 600) brought Christianity to China. His group of Syriac-speaking missionaries from Persia arrived in China around 635. Not much is known about him, but the Nestorian Stele—an artifact written in both Chinese and Syriac and dating to 781—identifies Alopen by name. Arriving during the foreigner-friendly Tang Dynasty, Alopen’s mission established a Christian presence in China that lasted more than two hundred years and included monasteries all over the country.
Origen’s vision, it seems, knew no limits. It extended so far as to teach that all creatures, including the devil himself, would one day be restored to communion with God. Hell would be emptied. That doctrine, above all others, caused him no end of trouble.
Reklam