Jenkins again: “in 782, the Indian Buddhist missionary Prajna arrived in the Chinese imperial capital of Chang’an, but was unable to translate the Sanskrit sutras he had brought with him into either Chinese or any other familiar tongue . . . . He duly consulted the bishop named Adam . . . . . . Continue Reading »
Islam took over areas once Christian, but Christianity left its mark on the conquerors. Jenkins writes: “No worthwhile history of Islam could omit the history of the Sufi orders, whose practices often recall the bygone world of the Christian monks. It was the Christian monastics . . . . Continue Reading »
Philip Jenkins writes, “we need to realize that such incidents of decline and disappearance [like the decline of Christianity he recounts in his book] are quite frequent, however little they are studied or discussed. Dechristianization is one of the least studied aspects of Christian . . . . Continue Reading »
Philip Jenkin’s earlier books turn the world upside down - south is up, north is down. His recent The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia—and How It Died does the same for eastern ad western Christianity. . . . . Continue Reading »
William Dalrymple’s Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India explores the clash between modernization and tradition in contemporary India. Early on, he illustrates with several anecdotes from his travels: “Outside Jodhpur, I visited a shrine and pilgrimage centre that . . . . Continue Reading »
Did Alexandrian Jews support the Arians? Athanasius charged as much, and his assessment has been found convincing to more than one modern historian. Victor Tcherikover wrote, “Jews became openly hostile to the new rulers” after Constantine’s conversion, “and proffered . . . . Continue Reading »
Jews settled in Alexandria as soon as it was Alexandria, that is, in 332 BC. In the first century AD, they were a powerful and sizable minority of the city. Between 66 and 117 AD, however, they suffered a massive reversal. Robert Louis Wilken ( Judaism and the Early Christian . . . . Continue Reading »
Pierre Bourdieu defined ” doxa ” (originally, “opinion” or in the NT, “glory”) in a variety of ways, but a couple are illuminating. Doxa is “the world of tradition experienced as a ‘natural world’ and taken for granted,” the set of . . . . Continue Reading »
Lee Martin McDonald (in the afore-cited article) suggests that intimidation was one factor in sharpening Christian polemics against Judaism. Jews were, after all, vastly more numerous than Christians: “By the turn of the first century, those who counted themselves among the Christians . . . . Continue Reading »
Christians often operate on the assumption that the New Testament marked the end of interaction between Christians and Jews. Paul shakes the dust off his feet at Rome, quotes Isaiah 6, and that’s that. The danger that Christians might deconvert to Judaism was over as soon as the . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
