CHRISTIANITY i. In Pre-Islamic Persia: Literary Sources

In Middle Persian there are three terms used for Christians: KLSTYDʾN and NʾCLʾY in the inscription on the Kaʿba-ye Zardošt of the 3rd-century Zoroastrian high priest Kartir; and tarsāq, Sogdian loan-word trsʾq, New Persian tarsā. The first term represents Syriac kristyānē; the second, Syr. naṣrāya “Nazarene” (cf. Heb. nôtsrî “Christian”). The third, “(God-)fearer,” evidently is a translation of Syr. daḥlā (and cf. Psalm 135.20, Heb. yîrei YHWH “fearers of God”). J. de Menasce (see Bibliography) discusses the latter word in the context of a 9th-century Zoroastrian polemic against Christianity, and believes it was applied originally to monks, but S. Pines (see Bibliography) argues that the term was used independently of monasticism. It has been suggested that the two different terms for Christians reflect the division between the Greek-speaking Christian communities, many of whose members were presumably deportees from western regions conquered by the Sasanians, particularly Šāpūr I, and the Syriac- and Iranian-speaking, indigenous Church of Persia. In the Pahlavi translation of the Psalter, unbelievers are called na-tarsāgān, lit. “unfearing ones.” The term “Messianist” (cf. Ar. masīḥī), used commonly in the Middle East of Christians, seems not to have been employed in Persia: for Syr. mešīhā, “Messiah”, the literal translation ʾnwtky (pronounced *annūdag), “annointed,” is employed.

History. J. Asmussen (Camb. Hist. Iran III/2, p. 294) observes that the reference to travelers from Parthia, Media, and Elam (Ḵūzestān) in the description of Pentacost, Acts 2.9, suggests the presence in the Parthian period of Jews who were to become the nuclei of future Christian communities in Persia. But the main body of Eastern converts to the new faith must be assumed to have been in northern Mesopotamia: Syriac-speaking Adiabene and Osrhoene. Queen Helena of Adiabene and her son Izates (i.e., Mid. Ir. yazad) had converted to Judaism in the 1st century b.c.e., and she is supposed to have donated golden vessels to the Temple at Jerusalem. None of these survive; but the foot of the Menorah on the Arch of Titus at Rome, “with its pendant leaves, closely resembles the bases of Persian columns at Susa and Persepolis” (Yarden, p. 12, with figs. 5, 13, and 14). If the seven-branched candelabrum was not actually a gift of Helena, it reflects the strong Iranian influence on Jewish art of the period.

But the earliest Iranian contact with Christianity must be counted as the visit to the infant Jesus of the three Magi. Many aspects of this legend reflect Iranian religious belief: The Magi were themselves Parthian priests, and Herzfeld identified the “Mountain of Victory” from which they were supposed in Christian apocryphal writings to have come with Kūh-e Ḵᵛāja in Sīstān. The temple complex rises over Lake Hāmūn, where the Zoroastrian Saošyant, “Savior,” is to be born. Christ is found in a rock-cave, like the infant Mithras, rather than a manger; and each Magus entering beholds the Lord at a different age, as though He were Zurvan. In early Christian art, the Magi are shown in Iranian priestly garb; and the soldiers of Ḵosrow II at Bethlehem are reported to have spared a church there when they recognized in a mosaic their own priests (Herzfeld, pp. 61ff; Messina; Mathews; Russell, 1987b). (For a comparison of the numerical symbolism of Iranian and Christian eschatology, see Russell, 1989).

Christian eschatological doctrines, beliefs concerning heaven and hell, and expressions of a moral and cosmic dualism of forces of good and evil, may have their origin in the koine of Greek and Iranian thought which colored intertestamental Judaism—in the Parthian period—but was in large part excluded from Orthodoxy by the Rabbis. (On possible Iranian influences, see Boyce, Zoroastrianism III, pp. 440-56; other scholars whose focus is the Hellenistic world, such as Arthur Darby Nock, place greater emphasis on the heritage of Plato in the formulation of such Christian doctrines.) The legends of Apostolic missions to the East in the 1st century c.e. presuppose that the bearers of the Christian teaching passed through Parthian territory (see Russell, 1986). More materially, it is during the poorly documented Parthian period that the church at Dura Europos was built. Though the border town on the Euphrates was under Roman control, many Iranians passed through it, as the Parthian documents, and graffiti from the synagogue, attest; and it is likely that the Christian community of Iran acquired its first strength under the tolerant Arsacids.

By the beginning of the Sasanian period are recorded twenty Christian bishops, from Bēṯ Zabdē to the north through Karkā de Bēṯ Selôḵ, and south to Susiana and Mesene (Mešān; Asmussen, Camb. Hist. Iran III/2, p. 925); and Bardesanes (late 2nd-early 3rd century) refers to Christians in Parthia, Media, Kāšān, and Pārs. By 250, the religion claimed so many adherents in Iran that no less than sixty Christian tombs are found on Ḵarg island in the Persian Gulf. One John of Persis is recorded at the Council of Nicaea in 325. In 410, a Synod was convened at Ctesiphon: The royal capital had become also the acknowledged center of Christianity in the Empire. The proceedings began with a prayer for the king, Yazdegerd I; and the Synod adopted the creed of Nicaea (Asmussen, Camb. Hist. Iran III/2, pp. 941-42). Six provinces were then listed as Christian jurisdictions, including Ray and Abaršahr; in the late 6th century, Marv and Herat, whose Christian communities were already centuries old, are prominently mentioned. Ṯaʿālebī (Ḡorar, p. 748) reports that in 651, it was the Bishop of Marv who contributed a sepulcher for the murdered Sasanian fugitive Yazdegerd III.

In Iranian lands outside the Sasanian Empire, there were large and important Christian communities, notably that of Sogdia, which has left a relatively large body of translation literature from Syriac. Christian Sogdian is written in Syriac estrangela script with additional characters for certain Iranian sounds and a system of vocalic points, but without the archaisms of orthography or Aramaic ideograms which encumber the Sogdian texts of other denominations. One such manuscript contains homilies, the Apostolic Canons, a liturgical commentary, and lives of diverse saints and Persian martyrs (see Sims-Williams). From the early Muslim period there is mentioned a Nestorian metropolitan at Samarkand; and two ossuaries found at nearby Afrāsīāb have Maltese-type crosses. This indicates that some Sogdian Christians continued the funerary practices of their Zoroastrian neighbors and forebears. There were other similarities: Sogdian Christians, like their countrymen of other faiths, were often travelling merchants: crosses with Sogdian inscriptions are found on a rock at Drangtse, in Ladakh. Christianity was eradicated at Samarkand only in the mid-15th century, with the massacre or forced conversion to Islam of the remnants of the faithful (see Grenet, p. 265 and pls. 13, 35; Colless). Farther to the east, in Xinjiang, was found a fragment of a translation into Pahlavi from Syriac of the Psalms, which Andreas dated on paleographical grounds to the mid-6th century (Andreas and Barr), indicating that a number of Christians were amongst the Persians who settled along the Silk Road.

The conversion of Constantine to Christianity, and the adoption of the faith as the state religion of the Roman Empire early in the fourth century, placed Christians in Iran under immediate suspicion as potential traitors: According to Eusebius, Constantine himself wrote to Šāpūr II, warning him that Šāpūr I in 260 had been allowed by God to defeat Valerian because the latter had persecuted the Christians. Ca. 337, Aphrahat wrote, “The People of God have received prosperity, and success awaits the man who has been the instrument of that prosperity [i.e., Constantine]; but disaster threatens the army gathered together by the efforts of a wicked and proud man puffed up by vanity [Šāpūr] … the [Roman] Empire will not be conquered, because the hero whose name is Jesus is coming with His power, and His armor will uphold the whole army of the Empire” (Demonstration 5.1.24, cit. by Brock; see also Wiessner). Christianity was practiced throughout the Empire; but the largest populations were in sensitive western border regions, and numerous Christians served in the armed forces. Although the Armenian Eznik Kolbatsʿi (Refutation of Sects 4.2) was in the 5th century to insist that one could be the servant of either the Persian king of kings (arkʿayitsʿ arkʿay) or Caesar, the Great Persecution, which began in 339 and lasted forty years—until the death of Šāpūr II—engulfed many subjects of the king of kings who were both Christian and loyal: Goštāzād pleaded that after his execution it be made known that he had died because of his religion, and not on account of disloyalty.

Yazdegerd I accorded tolerance and even favor to Christians and other minorities: His queen, Šōšendoḵt, was the daughter of the Jewish reš galūṯa “head of the dispersion”; and his policy earned him the enduring sobriquet “the Sinner” (Pahl. bazaggar as in Markwart, Provincial Capitals, p. 67) or “the Harsh One” (dabr; cf. Markwart, Ērānšahr, p. 67) amongst Zoroastrians, and in later Muslim historiography. When the third Synod was convened at Ctesiphon in 424, and Dādīšōʿ was made Catholicus of the Orient, the Church of Persia had become largely independent of the old, Western jurisdictions; and, as if to underscore the separation, the Nestorian teaching became in the 5th century the established doctrine of the Church of Persia. In 428, Nestor became the Patriarch of Byzantium. He taught that Christ had two separate natures, divine and human. They remained separate; Mary was not the theotókos, “Mother of God.” Cyril of Alexandria argued that the two natures of Christ became inextricably one with His birth. He opposed Nestor; and the latter was anathematized at the Council of Ephesus in 431. Many Nestorians were forced to flee Edessa, which was under Byzantine rule. They took refuge in Sasanian held Nisibis. Christians regarded as heretics by the western Church were obviously preferable from the Iranian point of view to those who maintained ties with it, and, thereby, with the Byzantine enemy. It has been suggested that Nestorian rejection of the divinity of the man Jesus, and certain anti-ascetic trends in Persian Christianity, reflect Zoroastrian influence (see Asmussen, 1962, p. 10; Geroe); but in general Iranian policy was guided, not by nuances of akdēnīh “evil religion,” but by political expediency.

In the meantime, Eutyches, an archimandrite at Constantinople, opposed the idea of two natures of Christ, and held that there was but one, the divine: the very flesh of Jesus was not of human nature. This doctrine, the Monophysite (“one nature”), was refuted by the Council of Chalcedon in 451, which held that Christ had one hypostasis, but two natures (Gk. ousia). In the sixth century, the Syrian Monophysites at Edessa, under the leadership of Jacob Bar-Addei, came to be styled as Jacobites; those who adhered to the Chalcedonian doctrine, which the Byzantine Empire upheld, were called Melkite, i.e., “royal” (see Young; Pigulevskaya).

At various times, Byzantium attempted to intervene to protect Christians in Iran. Treaties between the two Empires contained clauses providing for the reciprocal toleration of Iranian Christians and of Zoroastrians in Byzantine lands (presumably, Anatolia; see Gray). But in the Acts of Šīrīn (published by Devos), it is reported that the martyr was transported from one prison to another, so that a Byzantine embassy never succeeding in securing a meeting with her. Golendoḵt, a relative of Ḵosrow I, was converted to Christianity by prisoners of war. She refused to recant and was sent to the Fortress of Oblivion. There she was visited by a legate of Maurice on a peace mission: Though he would have been able to have her released, she settled on martyrdom, and perished in 591. Very much less is known of the fate of the Zoroastrians who lived in Christendom: principally, Anatolia and Egypt. In 377 c.e., St. Basil of Caesarea, in Cappadocia, described in a letter to Bishop Epiphanius of Salamis, Cyprus, the magousaion ethnos, “nation of the Magians” (the Greek derives from Syr. magusāyē, which is also the source of the Koranic and later Muslim designation of Zoroastrians, Ar. majūsī). He says they have neither books nor teachers of doctrine, but pass down their traditions from father to son by word of mouth, calling fire God and tracing their descent to one Zarnouas; they shun the society of others, keeping to themselves (i.e., Zurvan; St. Basil of Caesarea, Letters, IV, Loeb Classical Library, 1934, no. 258, p. 45). This writer has suggested that descendants of such communities in Armenia, together with the unconverted remnants of the indigenous Armenian Zoroastrians, were the people called arewordikʿ “Children of the Sun” by medieval writers (Russell, 1987c, Ch. 16). In the pre-Christian period, Iranians residing in Syrian and Anatolian Greek cities of the Roman Empire subsidized Olympic athletes and erected splendid public edifices; and 4th-century Iran boasted many priestly academies. So the impression given by St. Basil is of a community socially and culturally impoverished, by contrast equally with its Hellenistic predecessors and Sasanian contemporaries. The Jews were to be subject to increasingly onerous restrictions, culminating in the viciously anti-Semitic edicts of Justinian; the Zoroastrians of the Empire, fewer in number and less inured to the conditions of a diaspora, cannot have fared better.

Monophysitism endured on the eastern fringes of the Byzantine Empire notably in Armenia. During the fourth century, the Armenian Arsacids, and then most of the population, gradually embraced Christianity—an act which had the political benefit of further separating the country from the Sasanians, who were detested as usurpers of the legitimate, Parthian crown. Some of the ancient dynastic families, the nakharars, still held fast to Mazdaism: The Christian sources vilify them as traitors to the nation. In the 4th century, the Arian doctrine, which held Christ to be a kind of demigod, had gained adherents in eastern Anatolia and, as it seems, at the Arsacid court of Armenia. It was condemned by the Council of Nicaea in 325 and the Armenian Church waged a fierce battle against it (see Garsoian, 1985; idem, 1989). In the 5th century, there were new conflicts within Armenian Christianity, this time between Monophysites, Nestorians (who had Sasanian sanction), and (pro-Byzantine) Chalcedonians (see Sarkissian). Yazdegerd II attempted to force the Armenians to reconvert to Zoroastrianism, and defeated their commander, Vardan Mamikonean at the Battle of Avarayr in 451. The campaign was led by the wuzurg framadār Mehr-Narseh, of the noble Arsacid Spandīād family. The Armenian historian Łazar Pʿarpetsʿi describes him preaching Zoroastrianism to the Armenian Varazvalan, and calls him cḥʿarahnar ew dzhnamit, “conceiver of evil and malign in thought.” From the Sasanian sources, a rather different picture of this powerful Prime Minister emerges: He founded a village, Mehr-Narseyān, and endowed its fire temple; and at his own expense he built a bridge at Fīrūzābād and left a dedicatory inscription in Middle Persian which is still there. Although some nakharars fought on the Sasanian side, the Armenian campaign was not successful: after a protracted guerrilla war, Iran conceded religious liberty to Armenia in the terms of the Treaty of Nuarsak, 484. New persecution, and renewed resistance under Vardan II, flared up in 570. But in the reign of Ḵosrow II, Armenia had come to be seen as a stable province of the Empire; so the Sasanians accorded some favor toward the Armenian Church, and accordingly, toward Monophysitism. The later Sasanian kings presided directly over the Synod of the Church of Persia at Ctesiphon: Ḵosrow I imposed his own nominee as Catholicus in 552; and in 609, Ḵosrow II expressed anger when his nominee was passed over, and forbade the election of any other.

Many Christians, wearied by the incessant wars of the 7th century and exhausted by punitive taxation, welcomed with palm fronds the Arab conquerors of Ctesiphon. Christianity, along with other minority faiths such as Manicheism, enjoyed a brief period of expansion in the early centuries of Islam, only to suffer diminution later on through conversion and attrition in times of strife, particularly in the 15th century, after which the faith survived only precariously in Iranian lands (see Morony, pp. 384-430).

Polemics. The Syriac martyrologies record abundant exchanges between captive Christians and their Mazdean persecutors. A pattern such as this is often encountered: A Christian, frequently a high-born Iranian proselyte, might approach a sacred fire, sweep it from its altar, and trample it underfoot; or break the barsom bundle; or, if a woman, deliberately defile the fire temple precincts by entering them in menses. The examining magistrate, usually a high-ranking Magus, then demanded monetary restitution, or return to the Good Religion, which the apostate eloquently rejected, desiring rather to receive the crown of martyrdom. During the Great Persecution in 339-79, when perhaps 35,000 died, many Christians certainly did not provoke the persecution that befell them, and for many martyrs the imitatio Christi, and not abuse of an alien or ancestral religion, was their motive to the end; yet it is worthy of note that the practice of the Christian faith was never actually forbidden in the Empire. Details of grisly tortures are recorded (as of binding sagdēs “in the manner of a dog”—the Pahlavi names of these procedures are rendered in Syriac script); during these, the martyr refuted diverse Zoroastrian doctrines. In one debate at Ctesiphon in 612 c.e., George of Izla, a Persian whose former name was Mihramgošnasp, declared that the Zoroastrians were worshipers of fire, not of God. The Magus replied that one worshiped God through fire. George then produced an Avestan passage in which fire is called a god. The priest explained that this is because fire is of the same nature as Ohrmazd (Morony, p. 287, citing Hoffmann, pp. 109-10; the latter is the largest compilation of sources translated from Syriac on Christian martyrs in Iran; see also Zaehner, esp. pp. 419-46).

In Armenia, the principal refutations of Zoroastrianism belong to Eznik, 5th century, and to Ełiše, who probably lived about a century later and reproduces the former’s arguments, in the dramatic setting of the war of Vardan against Yazdegerd II. On the plane of theory, Eznik focuses primarily on the logical inconsistencies of the Zurvanite cosmological myth, relying in large part upon Syriac sources—mainly, it is supposed, on a Syriac translation of the Peri tēs en Persidi magikēs of Theodore of Mopsuestia (see Zaehner, p. 420)—though he produces also a number of abstract arguments against dualism. The battle of the Armenian Christians against Sasanian proselytism and persecution is justified, as one might expect, in more emotional, biblical terms: Pʿawstos compares Šāpūr II to Nebuchadnezzar, invoking the paradigm of the Book of Daniel; and Ełiše compares the Armenian champions to the Maccabees. The Armenians were outraged by the Zoroastrian practice of consanguineous marriage (Av. xvāetvadātha-) and called the Persians kinemol “woman-crazy.” In the text of Ełiše, the Iranians are made to retort that Christian monks by their celibate way of life depopulate the world and thereby further the destructive aims of Ahriman. The later arguments of the Škand-gumānīg wizār follow the same line: How, asks Mardānfarroḵ, could a good God have created the noxious serpent of Eden? And, paralleling talmudic critiques of Christianity, the same text ridicules the idea that God could have been born of an earthly woman. The Jews and Christians in the Sasanian Empire devoted more attention to refuting each other than to attacking Mazdaism. The theologian and Persian convert Aphrahat, writing in the mid-4th century, remarks in one polemic that God did not rest after Creation because He was weary. This cannot be a response to any Jewish doctrine, though; but is more likely an implicit answer to a Zoroastrian charge, not cited by Aphrahat but independently attested later in Škandgumānīg wizār, that the God of the Bible was too weak and insufficient to create the world (see Neusner, p. 125).

Intercultural contacts. Mani, though a native speaker of Aramaic and not a Zoroastrian, grew and taught in a largely Iranian milieu, and his doctrines were very widely disseminated through Iranian lands. He describes himself as a physician, as Jesus did; and in his Persian-language Šābuhragān, Jesus is represented through citations from the New Testament. Manicheans, in the manner of Christians, organized monasteries, and encouraged asceticism and celibacy. Even though the Manicheans adhered to a Docetist viewpoint, disbelieving that the Lord Himself might have been susceptible to crucifixion, but only seemed to suffer and die, many Iranians must have learnt of some Christian beliefs through Manicheism (see Waldschmidt and Lentz). Manicheism imitated the legends of the Christian apostolic missions in the literature describing its own propagation: For example, the Sogdian text which describes the mission of Mar Gabryab to ryβʾn (probably Arbanos, mistaken for Revan, i.e., Erevan, whose Iranian form had more familiar, Zoroastrian associations) in Armenia and his conversion of the princess and royal court, with their subsequent backsliding from Manicheism to Christianity (!), is historically improbable. More likely it is a conflation of two legends of the missions of Sts. Thaddeus and Bartholomew (the Armenian sources present these together) with the names of the faiths involved suitably altered (for the text, see Sundermann, pp. 45-49).

Aspects of Christian iconography reflect interaction with Zoroastrian culture. The Persian word for the cross, čalīpā, Chr. Sogd. clybʾ; derives from Aramaic ultimately, but appears to have undergone internal development in Iranian. Nestorian crosses on monuments in China are often shown above an open lotus, taking the place, as it were, of the Buddha. In pre-Christian Armenia, sacred monuments (Arm. arzdan) were often made in the form of a stepped pyramid with an eagle or spear at the top. St. Gregory the Illuminator, a scion of the noble Parthian house of Suren, who established Christianity in Armenia, erected arzdans surmounted by the cross. The Armenians carved vast numbers of khacḥʿkʿars, “cross stones,” which became objects of cult. At Dvin, the capital of the Sasanian marzbāns of Armenia, the cross is framed by a pair of wings spreading upward from its base: This is, evidently, a Christian appropriation of a Sasanian iconographic convention. Another Sasanian convention to indicate divine glory and protection was to enclose a picture or device in a ribbon, usually creased and with the ends fluttering up to either side. Such a ribbon encloses the cross in a 6th-century Georgian relief from Akvaneba—it is recalled that Georgia was a Sasanian province (see Rice; Foster, on the Chinese Nestorian examples; and Beridze, pl. 19). It is to be noted that Mithra at Ṭāq-e Bostān stands upon a lotus: This would indicate the influence of Buddhist iconography in Iran itself. If the image of Christ enclosed in a radiant mandorla, found early in Armenia and later on farther to the west, derives from similar Indian representations of the Buddha, then such an image came through Sasanian Iran. That there was an intriguing, if sparsely documented, Buddhist-Iranian syncretism, is borne out by Stavisky’s discovery of a Buddha image in the vihāra at Qara Tepe (Old Termeḏ, in Bactria) with a Bactrian graffito “Buddha-Mazda” scratched above it.

Another area of interaction was in the official use of seals and titulature. The former have been studied by Judith Lerner: The cross is the predominant symbol, in some compositions evidently replacing the Zoroastrian fire (as on Georgian Christian coins modeled after Sasanian issues). As to titles, N. G. Garsoian has shown that the Zoroastrian ecclesiastical title, driyōšān ǰādagōw, “intercessor on behalf of the poor [i.e., the faithful],” was adopted by the Armenian Christian clergy (1989, p. 534 s.v. jatagow, citing Pʿawstos 4.3, with references).

In the Armenian and Iranian translations of Christian works, Zoroastrian terms are used, sometimes, it would seem, deliberately. In Armenian, for example, the word “righteous” is translated ardar, cognate with but not derived from Iranian; in Christian Sogdian the word is ʾrtʾw, from the Zoroastrian usage ardāw; and in the Pahlavi Psalter Syriac zadîqâ, “righteous,” again is rendered as ʾrtʾdy/*ardāy/ (see Russell, 1987a; idem, 1987c, Ch. 15). The Armenian translation of the Bible utilizes some Zoroastrian terms which would have been familiar to 5th-century hearers: e.g., “Dionysiac” is rendered spandarametakan in Maccabees. To Armenian šnorh-kʿ “grace,” from Pahlavi šnōhr, Avestan xšnaoΘra-, corresponds Pahlavi /burd-šnōhr/, “grateful,” in the Psalter. Christian Pahlavi pʾdlky, corresponding to Syriac qurbānā, “offering, sacrifice,” is paralleled by the Armenian loanword for the Divine Liturgy, patarag. Pahlavi uzdēs, the term used for the religious images of the yazatas which Sasanian iconoclasts destroyed, is found in the Psalter as the word for an idol (Ps. 134.15).

The Christian communities also served as a conduit for Greek science and literature (in Syriac translation) to enter Sasanian Iran, and, ultimately, Islamic culture. The Christian Boḵtīšūʿ family, for example, provided prominent physicians to the royal court, and presided over the Nestorian medical academy at Gondešāpūr (see Rosenthal, pp. 6-7). The Pahlavi Dēnkard contains large philosophical sections derived from Aristotle; and Paul the Persian dedicated a Syriac book on Aristotelian logic to Ḵosrow I, who was responsible for the final redaction of the great Sasanian Avesta of twenty-one nasks that incorporated much knowledge which Zoroastrian apologists claimed had been “lost” to Greece and India and subsequently recovered (see Bailey, Zoroastrian Problems, p. 80, citing Baumstark, 1922, passim).

Iranians confronted by the innovations of Christian culture changed their archaic ways of learning. There died in 620 a Persian convert to Christianity, ʿIšōsabrān. His Life was written by the Nestorian patriarch ʿIšōyahb: In his native village of Kur on Mt. Hedayab, ʿIšōsabrān had requested of the priest who converted him, ʿIšōrahmeh, that the latter’s young son ʿIšōzekh teach him to read Scripture. The boy explained to the proselyte that one learnt first letters, then syllables, then the Psalms, then the rest of the Bible. “It is useless to teach me letters, teach me ten Psalms,” said ʿIšōsabrān. The youth tried to explain that it was in vain to “mumble like the Magi”; but ʿIšōsabrān memorized whole words, pronouncing each forcefully and repeating it “nodding his neck, like the Magi.” ʿIšōzekh taught him to read quietly, moving only his lips; and eventually ʿIšōsabrān learned to read whole books (see Chabot).

Although the zamzama (“muttering,” a pejorative usage of the Muslim period, translating Pahl. drānǰišn “recitation”) of the Avesta endured, the Zoroastrians were forced in various ways to counter the challenge Christian literacy posed to their traditions of oral learning. It was, possibly, in response to Christian credos and prayer books that the 4th-century high priest Ādūrbād ī Amahraspandān, patriarch of the subsequent generations of high priests, still revered by many Parsis as the rāyēnīdār ī zamān “regulator of the age,” composed the Pahlavi credo Nām stāyišn “Praise is meet to the Name of Ohrmazd,” and compiled the Ḵorda Avesta “Little Avesta”—the prayer book containing it, which is still used in daily devotions (see Russell, in press). The Manichean and Armenian scripts, especially the latter, the first true Oriental alphabet, may have stimulated the invention of the Avestan alphabet in the 5th century.

CHRISTIANITY ii. In Pre-Islamic Persia: Material Remains

Apart from literary sources, evidence for Christian communities within the Sasanian empire is scarce. Although Christians may have been among the deportees from Roman Syria who worked on the monuments of Šāpūr I (240-70 c.e.) at Bīšāpūr and the dam at Šūštar (see deportations), nothing identifiably Christian has been excavated in Persia itself. Archeological remains on the Persian Gulf island of Ḵārg, northwest of Bushire (Būšehr) and opposite Bahrain, attest to a Nestorian Christian community there from the 3rd to the 7th century (Bowman; Ghirshman, pp. 11-14, 17-22; Haerinck, pp. 159-66; Herzfeld, pp. 103-4; Matheson, pp. 245-49). In the center of the island, near the remains of a fire temple and associated with rock-cut Zoroastrian tombs that served as ossuaries (astōdāns), are several large man-made eaves with rectangular entrances, each with a cross engraved above it (Haerinck, pp. 162-64; Herzfeld, p. 103). There is no evidence, however, that nearby two Palmyran-style tombs, used for multiple burials, were Christian catacombs, as Ernst Herzfeld thought (pp. 103-5 and pls. XVIII and XIX). Instead, they may have served as hypogea for a colony of 3rd-century Palmyran traders, who most likely used the island as an entrepôt in their trade with India (Haerinck, pp. 138ff.). On the western side of the island were discovered the remains of a church and monastery, built mainly of dressed stone (Ghirshman, p. 24 pl. 15; Persian excavations reported by Bowman; Matheson, pp. 248-49). The triple nave of the church was probably roofed by three barrel vaults; the walls were decorated in stucco, much of it similar in style to the late Sasanian decoration at Ṭāq-e Bostān. The monastery, which formed an outer wall around the church, contained some sixty cells, each consisting of three small chambers. Also associated with the site were several small ruins, each surrounded by a wall, which may have housed the married Nestorian clergy (Matheson, p. 249).

More clearly identifiable Christian remains have been discovered farther west. A private house at Dura-Europos on the Euphrates river provides the earliest archeological evidence of a Christian community in the Near East, built, or at least adapted, for Christian worship in 232 c.e. (Kraeling, pp. 34-39, 140). It is the best-preserved example of the domus ecclesiae that was in use before the universal adoption of the basilica during the reign of Constantine in the 4th century (Kraeling, pp. 127, 139-41). The church proper, which was entered through a portico and courtyard, consisted of a rectangular assembly hall with a raised platform at its eastern end and a sacristy. The vestibule west of the courtyard served as a place of instruction for catechumens and neophytes; behind it, northwest of the courtyard, was a baptistry, which contained a font covered by a baldachin and was richly decorated with painted scenes from the Old and New Testaments—Adam and Eve, David and Goliath, the women at the tomb, Christ’s meeting with the woman of Samaria, the healing of the paralytic, the rescue of St. Peter from the Sea of Galilee, and, directly above the font, the Good Shepherd. The building served Dura’s Christian community until the destruction of the city by Šāpūr I in 256 (Kraeling, p. 34).

In Iraq remains of Christian basilical churches survive from the Sasanian period. Two such churches, of mud brick, were excavated at Ḥīra the seat of the vassal Lakhmid dynasty, on the Euphrates river southwest of Ctesiphon (Rice, 1932a; idem, 1932b; idem, 1934). One resembled the church on Ḵārg, with three aisles separated by columns of baked brick and roofed by three barrel vaults, whereas the other was apparently roofed by a single span (Rice, 1932b, pp. 280 fig. 1, 281 fig. 2; idem, 1934, pp. 53 fig. 5, 54 fig. 6). At the east end of each church were three chapels, with straight, rather than apsidal, eastern walls. The central chapels were squares with niches on the interior walls; the flanking chapels were rectangular. Fragments of painted plaster found in the chapels show that they had been decorated with Christian symbols: crosses and possibly an orant figure (Rice, 1932b, pp. 282-83, fig. 3; cf. idem, 1934, pp. 54-58). Small stucco plaques with elaborate designs, including prominent crosses, incised or in relief, were also found in the churches, which are of the 7th, or possibly the 6th, century and were still in use after the Muslim conquest (Rice, 1932b, p. 279; idem, 1934, p. 54).

At Ctesiphon itself, which had been the seat of the Nestorian catholicos at least since the 5th century (see i, above), a monumental brick structure was identified by German excavators as a church (Meyer, p. 23; Reuther, p. 450). The nave without aisles was probably roofed with a barrel vault supported on rectangular pillars aligned close to the sidewalls (Meyer, p. 23 fig. 12; Reuther, p. 49 fig. 1). Like the church at Ḥīra it had three rectangular rooms at its eastern end, the middle one broader than those flanking it. In the middle room four round holes formed a square in the floor in front of a step on the eastern wall; they may have been emplacements for the supports of a ciborium. An earlier, unfinished structure was discovered beneath this building (Reuther, p. 49 fig, 2). It consisted of a narrower nave, with thick, rounded pillars on square bases along the sidewalls. An ostracon found in the middle chapel of the later building bore an inscription in Syriac, calling upon the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Fragments of a nearly life-sized male sculpture, of painted stucco in high relief, were found in the same chapel; the drapery recalls that of late antique togated figures (Meyer, p. 25 fig. 13; Reuther, pl. VI). Pieces of painted and gilded ornamental stucco, including half-columns decorated with zigzag patterns and palmettes, were associated with the figure.

Another church, similar to the barrel-vaulted building at Ḥīra, with a triple-aisled nave and piers of baked brick, was discovered in the oasis of Raḥḥālīya, 110 km southwest of Baghdad (Finster and Schmidt, pp. 40-43). Three chapels without apses occupied the eastern end; as at Ḥīra, the outer two were rectangular, the central one square, though roofed with a dome and without wall niches (Finster and Schmidt, p. 41 fig. 13). Fragments of late Sasanian pottery were associated with the building.

The basilicas with three chapels at all these sites can be associated with the Nestorian church, the dominant Christian sect in Sasanian territories (for a 19th-century Nestorian church with three chapels see Kleiss, pp. 117 fig. 128, 118). There is also evidence of Monophysite Christians in the Sasanian empire in the basilica at Qaṣr Serīj (ʿĒn Qenāyē or ʿĒn Qenā; Nau, pp. 11, 27-30), 60 km northwest of Mosul, the church of St. Sergius in Bēṯ ʿArbāyē (Oates, pp. 97-117 [cf. arbāyistān]). It is unique among surviving Christian monuments in Iraq, in that its plan, enclosed by a portico on the north, south, and west sides, echoes that of many well-preserved examples in Syria (Oates, pp. 107, 112). The interior consists of a central nave flanked by narrower aisles and terminating in a single semicircular apse; on either side of the apse a small room projects beyond the external walls of the church, one serving as sacristy, the other as a martyrion for whatever relics the community possessed (Oates, pp. 108 fig. 13, 110 fig. 14). The church was surrounded by monastic buildings of mortared rubble, a construction material more traditional for the region than the carefully dressed limestone blocks of the church itself. The church probably dates to a few years after 559, when Ahudemmeh, founder of the monastery at Qaṣr Serīj and newly consecrated Monophysite bishop of Bēṯ ʿArbāyē, was granted permission by Ḵosrow I (531-79) to build churches (Oates, p. 115; Nau, pp. 27, 29-30). The only other material evidence for Christians in the Sasanian period is found on engraved stone seals. Some bear names like Jacob and Abraham, which may be Christian or Jewish, and are engraved with typically Sasanian motifs, such as a winged lion protome (Mordtmann, pl. IV/34; Shaked, p. 23). But a number of them, characteristically Sasanian in form and style, prominently display a cross or include one or two crosses as subsidiary motifs, as do some conical seals as well. The crosses are either variants of the Latin cross, with elongated lower arm, or of the Greek cross, with arms of equal length (Lerner, pp. 3-8 and pl. I). Some of the former can be related to Early Byzantine coins and metalwork (4th-7th centuries), whereas others resemble the crosses found in the Nestorian church at Ḥīra and at various sites in southern India associated with local Persian Nestorian communities (Gropp, p. 270 fig. 2; Anklesaria, p. 64). Other seal devices include Christian iconographic motifs (angels and orants) and scenes from the New Testament: the visitation, the adoration, and the entry into Jerusalem. Old Testament subjects also occur, as they held particular meaning for early Christians: the sacrifice of Isaac and Daniel in the lions’ den, often with crosses above his upraised hands (Lerner, pp. 18-26 pls. IV-VI).

Some seals are inscribed in Syriac or Pahlavi; a few in Arabic Kufic Script [cf. calligraphy] are post-Sasanian in date, though their style and motifs show continuity with examples from the Sasanian period. The names of the seal owners, when given, are Persian, which is not surprising, in view of the strong national character of the church in Persia.

CHRISTIANITY iii. In Central Asia And Chinese Turkestan

The main early centers of Syriac-speaking Christians were Edessa (modern Urfa in southeastern Turkey) and Arbela (in northern Iraq). By the end of the 3rd century the Syrian church was strongly established also in the western Persian empire, where it was sometimes harshly persecuted during the following centuries under Sasanian rule. In the 5th century the church in Persia made itself formally independent of the patriarchate of Antioch (see i, above). In 451 the Council of Chalcedon was called to settle a controversy concerning the relationship between the divine and human natures in the person of Jesus Christ. The formula by which the Council attempted to resolve this issue amounted to a rejection both of the Monophysite view, that the two natures were fused into one, and of the view attributed to Nestorius, who had been deposed as bishop of Constantinople for supposedly asserting the separability of Christ’s human and divine natures. Thereafter the history of the Syrian church was the history of three separate churches, one adhering to the orthodoxy of the Chalcedonian formula, the others upholding the two diametrically opposed points of view that the council had rejected. Nestorian christology was officially adopted by the church in Persia at a series of synods during the 480s, which finalized its separation from western Christendom.

The following survey will be principally focused on the Nestorian church of Persia, the “Church of the East,” which was responsible for the most significant and enduring missionary work in Transoxania and beyond. As a preliminary, it is convenient to summarize what is known of the eastern outposts of the other two branches of the Syrian church, the Melkites and the monophysite Jacobites, both of which had their main centers farther west and therefore played a less important role in the evangelization of Central Asia. Of the non-Syrian churches there is even less to be said. The 8th-9th century Notitia Episcopatuum, which lists bishoprics of the Orthodox church under the authority of the patriarch of Constantinople, includes a bishopric of Ḵᵛārazm (Gk. Khoualēs; de Boor, p. 531); much later, Georgian contingents in the Mongol army were accompanied by Orthodox clergy (Dauvillier, 1953, p. 82; on Armenian Christians in Central Asia see Dauvillier apud Pelliot, 1973, pp. 143-45). No attempt will be made here to cover the later Roman Catholic and Protestant missions (of which an early instance was Pope John XXII’s appointment of a Roman Catholic bishop of Samarkand in 1329; see Pelliot, 1973, p. 118).

Jacobites. During the second quarter of the 7th century Jacobite bishoprics were created in Sīstān and Herat as a result of the settlement in those regions of a number of Jacobites deported from Edessa (Bar Hebraeus, III, cols. 125-28). The detailed lists of bishops given by Michael the Syrian (Chabot, 1899-1901) indicate that a third Jacobite bishopric of Farāh was in existence by the early 9th century and that the bishoprics of Herat and Farāh survived until the 11th, that of Sīstān until at least the end of the 12th century (Fiey, pp. 96-102). Although the episcopal lists show that there were no Jacobite bishoprics farther east than Herat, according to some manuscripts of Marco Polo, Jacobites were to be found both at Yarkand (ed. Yule and Cordier, p. 187) and at Ghingintalas in northeastern Turkestan (tr. Moule and Pelliot, p. 156) in the 13th century.

Melkites. The branch of the Syrian church that acknowledged the authority of the patriarch of Antioch and followed the Greek-speaking church in accepting the Chalcedonian formula had a presence in Transoxania at least from 762. In that year, when the caliph al-Manṣūr founded Baghdad, the Melkites of Ctesiphon were transferred to Šāš (Tashkent), together with their catholicos, who was known thereafter as “catholicos of Rōmagyris” (Ar. Rūmajerd) and later, by the end of the 10th century, as “catholicos of Khorasan” (Zayat, pp. 20-23; Dauvillier, 1953, pp. 63-64). The new title has been taken to indicate another change of residence, perhaps to Marv, but it is more likely that Khorasan was understood in the more general sense of “the east,” in contradistinction to the area of jurisdiction of the catholicate in Baghdad, which had been revived in the 960s. Marv was, however, the seat of a Melkite metropolitan, according to Bīrūnī (Āṯār al-bāqīa, p. 289; tr. Sachau, p. 283). Bīrūnī also preserved the calendar of the festivals of the Melkites of Ḵᵛārazm, who were apparently well established in his time (Āṯār al-bāqīa, pp. 288-302; tr. Sachau, pp. 282-98). The Armenian Dominican Heṭʿum, writing in 1307, mentioned the presence in Ḵᵛārazm of Sogdians obedient to the patriarch of Antioch but using their own language, rather than Greek, in the liturgy (Pelliot, 1973, p. 117). If this statement is to be credited, which has been doubted (Spuler, pp. 154-55), the reference might be to a group of Melkites who had migrated from Šāš (Tashkent) to Ḵᵛārazm. The title “catholicos of Rōmagyris” is last attested in 1365, by which time it had become merely an honorary title borne by the catholicos of Georgia (Dauvillier, 1953, pp. 69-70).

The discovery at the Nestorian site of Bulayïq in Xin-jiang (Sinkiang) of a bilingual Psalm fragment in Greek and Sogdian (see bible v. sogdian translations of the bible) and of a form letter in Syriac apparently addressed to a Byzantine dignitary (Maróth) suggests contact with Melkite or Orthodox Christians in the west, rather than a significant Melkite presence in eastern Turkestan. A cross of the Mongol period with a Greek inscription bought at Khotan was of Chinese manufacture (Pelliot, 1914, p. 644; Dauvillier, 1953, p. 71).

Nestorians. The head of the Nestorian church was the catholicos, whose residence was at first Ctesiphon, later Baghdad. The metropolitans were chosen directly by the catholicos, generally from the clergy of his own circle. The metropolitan of one of the “exterior” provinces, once having journeyed to his distant diocese, might never return, being excused attendance at synods and empowered to consecrate his own suffragan bishops (see Spuler, p. 137). Nestorian priests were normally married, but celibacy was obligatory for the bishops, who were therefore usually chosen from among the monks.

As no narrative history of the advance of the Nestorian church into Central Asia and Chinese Turkestan survives, the evidence must be pieced together from many separate sources, both archeological and literary. Olaf Hansen’s theory that the Christian Sogdian manuscript C3 (now in the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin) contains part of a Central Asian church history has had to be abandoned since Werner Sundermann showed that the text in question belongs to the life of John of Deylam and deals with events in western Persia. The best modern surveys are those by J. Dauvillier (1948), which contains much valuable detail, including references to the primary sources, and Bertold Spuler (pp. 136-42 and 153-58). Alphonse Mingana provided a convenient though uncritical collection and translation of most of the relevant passages from Syriac and Christian Arabic texts.

The principal starting point for Christian missions to Central Asia and beyond was probably Marv, as is suggested by its location; by the more or less fanciful stories in Syriac and Arabic sources of the conversion of Turkish peoples by metropolitans of Marv (Mingana, pp. 305-6 and 308-11); and by the veneration of Baršabbā, the semilegendary evangelizer and first bishop of Marv, by the Christians of Ḵᵛārazm (where his commemoration was included in the Melkite liturgical calendar), Semirech’e (where the name Baršabbā is attested on a tombstone; Chwolson, 1890, p. 133), and Bulayïq (where the only surviving Syriac and Sogdian manuscripts of his life were found). From the evidence of the legend of Baršabbā, Christianity was introduced to Marv in the latter part of the 4th century; synodical subscription lists and other reliable historical sources indicate that the bishopric of Marv, as well as bishoprics of Abaršahr, Ṭūs, Herat, and Sīstān, had all been established by 424 at the latest (Chabot, 1902, pp. 665-85; Fiey, pp. 75-94). A “hostelry” at Gyaur Kala (old Marv) has been identified as a Christian building from crosses drawn on the walls (see Dresvyanskaya). Nestorian bishoprics were established in Herat and Sīstān by the early 5th century (see above), and in the middle of the following century, the patriarch Ābā I created a bishop for the Hephthalites (Bedjan, pp. 266-69; Mingana, pp. 304-5), probably the same as the bishopric of Bādḡīs, which is mentioned in a synod list for 585 (Fiey, pp. 93-94). Christianity had already reached northwestern Ḵᵛārazm by the end of the 7th century, as is attested by the ossuaries decorated with Nestorian crosses found at Mizdakhkan (Grenet, pp. 146-47, 202 n. 25, pl. XXXV). In the mid-13th century the Franciscan envoy William of Rubruck wrote (in the past tense) of the Nestorians of Ḵᵛārazm, reporting that they had previously employed the native language of the region for liturgical and literary purposes (Pelliot, 1973, pp. 113-17).

The evidence for Christianity in Sogdia has been conveniently summarized by B. E. Colless. Unfortunately the date when the Nestorian metropolitan see of Samarkand was founded is uncertain, being attributed in the Arabic and Syriac sources to various periods from the early 5th to the early 8th century; it is clear, however, that the Nestorians were already well established in Transoxania by the time that the Melkites were transported to Tashkent in 762. Nestorian Christianity seems to have been flourishing in the area of Samarkand in both the 10th and the 13th centuries, according to descriptions by Eṣṭaḵrī (p. 321), Ebn Ḥawqal (p. 498; tr. Kramers, II, p. 478), and Marco Polo (ed. Yule and Cordier, pp. 183, 186 n.); it was finally exterminated through persecution in the 15th century. Among the Christian remains found in Sogdia are a series of Syriac graffiti in a gorge near Urgut, 35 km from Samarkand, and an ostracon excavated at Panjīkand (Pyandzhikent) containing the first two Psalms in Syriac as a scribal exercise (see Paykova). A cross on the reverse of coins attributed to a ruler of Osrūšana (6th or early 7th century) has also been given a Christian interpretation (see Smirnova, p. 334). A number of ossuaries bearing Christian symbols have been excavated at Samarkand; these can be dated not later than the 7th century (Grenet, p. 160).

No Christian Sogdian texts have been discovered in Sogdiana, but the 9th century Sogdian inscription of Ladakh (west of Tibet) has been supposed to be the work of a Christian from Samarkand who had been sent as an emissary to the ruler of Tibet (see Henning, “Mitteliranisch,” p. 54). The occurrence of Syriac words in a Sogdian inscription from Kirghizia (Livshits, p. 80) shows that the Sogdians who colonized Semirech’e (the area between Lake Balkhash and the Issyk-Kul) included Christians. An 8th-century Nestorian church and burial site have been excavated at Ak-Beshim near Tokmak (Grenet, pp. 185-86). The long survival of Christianity in the region is attested by William of Rubruck’s account of Christians in the area south of Lake Balkhash in the mid-13th century (Pelliot, 1973, pp. 136-40) and by the numerous Nestorian tombstones with Syriac and Turkish inscriptions from cemeteries near Tokmak and Pishpek (modern Frunze), more than 500 of which were published by D. Chwolson (1890, 1897). Many of the latter bear dates concentrated between the beginning of the 13th and the middle of the 14th century, a period when the area seems to have been under the authority of a “metropolitan of Kashgar and Nawēkath” (Pelliot, 1973, p. 7).

The metropolitan see of Kashgar is known to have existed already in the late 12th century (Mingana, pp. 324-25), and Marco Polo referred to Nestorians both in Kashgar and in Yarkand (ed. Yule and Cordier, pp. 182, 187). A supposed reference to Christianity in a Khotanese text has been shown by R. E. Emmerick to be illusory. A Christian cemetery has, however, been found in Khotan, and, according to Gardīzī (ed. Ḥabībī, p. 270; cf. Dauvillier, 1948, p. 287), in the mid-5th/11th century there were two Christian churches there, one inside the city of Khotan and one outside the city. According to a statement in the Taḏkera of Maḥmūd-Karam Kābolī (a source of dubious historical value, though this detail has apparently been accepted as authentic by Spuler, p. 157), Khotan was governed by a Christian ruler in the middle of the 12th century (Blochet, pp. 25-27).

A significant expansion and consolidation of the Nestorian church took place under Patriarch Timothy I (780-823), who sent many missionaries to the east and consecrated metropolitan bishops for the Turks and for Tibet (Mingana, pp. 306-8). The very limited information available concerning Christianity in Tibet has been fully discussed by G. Uray. The “metropolitan of the Turks,” who may have been a missionary bishop for the nomadic Turkish tribes and perhaps had no fixed seat, was mentioned as late as the 14th century.

A metropolitan see of Almalyk (Almālīḡ) was mentioned in the late 13th and 14th centuries and a bishopric of Ha-mi (Qomul) in 1264-65. Of much greater significance as a source of information on Christianity in northern Xin-jiang are the archeological and literary remains discovered in the Turfan oasis at the beginning of the present century, when a Christian church with well-preserved frescos was excavated at Qočo (von Le Coq, p. 7), and a whole library of Christian literature in various languages, chiefly Sogdian and Syriac, was discovered at Shui-pang near Bulayïq; a few additional Christian texts in Syriac, Sogdian, and New Persian were found at Toyoq, Qočo, and Astana (see also bible iv. middle persian translations of the bible; iv, below; cf. Hage,1987, on the significance of the use of Syriac beside the various local vernaculars). Most of these manuscripts are thought to belong to the 9th and 10th centuries. Christian texts in Turkish, the latest of which may belong to the Mongol period, have been found at Bulayïq, at the nearby site of Qurutqa, and at Qočo (Zieme). From this substantial body of material a clear impression of the extent and nature of Christianity in the Turfan oasis can be obtained; as W. Hage has pointed out (1987), the Christian population there appears to have resisted faithfully any impulse toward doctrinal compromise with competing religions like Buddhism and Manicheism.

The presence of a Christian community farther east, at Tun-huang (Dunhuang), in the 8th-10th centuries is attested by a number of documents discovered by Marc Aurel Stein and Paul Pelliot in the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas (q.v.). The only Sogdian manuscript of recognizably Christian content from Tun-huang is a small fragment of a text of popular character, an oracle book of the type known in the west as sortes apostolorum; there are, however, several secular Sogdian documents either written by Christians or that mention Christians, including priests and monks. Syriac names include those of the priest Sargīs (Sergius), the monk David, and Gīwargīs (George), apparently a cleric of high rank; another priest bears the Sogdian name Wanu-čor and the Syriac title reš ʿedtā, literally “ecclesiarch,” that is, “bursar, steward” (Sims-Williams and Hamilton, 1990). The substantial evidence for Chinese Christianity at Tun-huang collected by A. C. Moule (pp. 52-64) includes a scroll containing a Chinese translation of the hymn Gloria in excelsis Deo together with a long list of other Christian texts that had been translated into Chinese in the late 8th century. The presence of Tibetan-speaking Christians at Tun-huang is less certain; neither the passage in a Tibetan divination text mentioning “the god Jesus Messiah” (in a syncretic, partly Buddhist context) nor the drawings of apparently Christian crosses in two other Tibetan manuscripts (Uray, pp. 412-20) can be taken as evidence for it. Finally, Marco Polo mentioned Turkish Nestorians in the region of Saciou, that is, Sha-zhou/run-huang (Dauvillier apud Pelliot, 1973, p. 134, where further references by Marco Polo to the presence of Christians in other cities of eastern Turkestan and China are also gathered together). (For the introduction of Christianity into China proper (in 635, according to the Syriac and Chinese inscription of Xi-an (Hsi-an), see Pelliot, 1984; cf. idem, 1973; Moule; Figure 1; for the later flowering of the Nestorian church among the Tangut, see Pigoulevsky).

Figure 1. James Legge, The Nestorian Monument of Hsî-an Fû in Shen-hsî, China, Relating to the Diffusion of Christianity in China in the Seventh and Eighth Centuries, London, 1888, frontispiece.View full image in a new tab

CHRISTIANITY iv. Christian Literature in Middle Iranian Languages

Middle Persian. When the Christian church in Persia made itself formally independent of the patriarchate of Antioch early in the 5th century, the reasons for this step seem to have been not so much doctrinal as political or nationalistic. Thus it is not surprising that the 5th century also saw the beginnings of a Christian literature in Middle Persian. The earliest such works of which we possess apparently reliable information belong to the latter part of the century, when the catholicos Aqāq (d. 496) translated a summary of the Christian religion by Elišaʿ bar Quzbāye from Syriac into Persian, for presentation to Kavād I (Baumstark, pp. 114-15), and Maʿnā of Shiraz, metropolitan of Rēw-Ardašīr, composed various works in Persian, including hymns (madrāše), “discourses” (memre), and responses (ʿonyātā) for liturgical use (Baumstark, p. 105). The statement that the catholicos Maʿnā, who lived in the first half of the 5th century, made translations from Syriac into Persian may rest on a confusion with the later Maʿnā (see Gerö, p. 23 n. 50).

In Persia itself Syriac eventually regained its status as the sole literary and liturgical language of the church, with the result that none of this Christian Persian literature survived, apart from a few texts preserved in Syriac translation, such as two legal works by the metropolitans Išoʿbōḵt and Simon (both published by Sachau, pp. 1-253). The only Christian work extant in Middle Persian is a fragmentary translation of the Psalms found at Bulayïq in Chinese Turkestan and published by F. C. Andreas and Kaj Barr (see BIBLE iv. MIDDLE PERSIAN TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE). A page found in the same area and containing paradigms of Middle Persian verbs (Barr) may also be of Christian origin. (For Christian seals with Middle Persian inscriptions, see Gignoux, Lerner; for the Christian Pahlavi inscriptions of India, see Henning, “Mitteliranisch,” pp. 51-52, and references given there.)

Sogdian. The Pahlavi Psalter mentioned above forms part of a library of Christian manuscripts unearthed by the second and third German Turfan expeditions at the ruined Nestorian monastery of Bulayïq, the majority of which are in Syriac and Sogdian. A very few Christian texts in Sogdian, Syriac, Turkish, and New Persian were found at other sites nearby in the Turfan oasis, for example, Qurtuqa, Qočo, and Toyoq. Most of these fragments are now in the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin; smaller collections are also housed in the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz and in the Museum für Indische Kunst in Berlin. Most of the Christian Sogdian manuscripts are written in a variety of Syriac script, with the addition to the alphabet of the new letters f, x, and `; a very few in cursive Sogdian script. Some Christian Sogdian texts may have originated in Sogdiana, where the Nestorian church was well established by the early 8th century at the latest, but no such text has been found there; the literature to be surveyed here is known only from manuscripts found in Chinese Turkestan.

Syriac was the principal language of the liturgy at Bulayïq, where several Syriac psalters, hymnbooks, and service books were found. Some of them contain rubrics in Sogdian, which show that they were copied and used by members of the local community. The Sogdian manuscripts, too, include a number of fragments of psalters and lectionaries containing portions of the Bible appointed to be read or sung in the services of the church (Müller; Sundermann, 1974; idem, 1975, idem; 1981; Schwartz, 1967, pp. 126-44; idem, 1974; see BIBLE v. SOGDIAN TRANSLATIONS OF THE BIBLE). Other Sogdian texts possibly intended for liturgical use are a copy of the Nicene Creed (Müller, pp. 84-88), a page from a “Book of Life,” a text commemorating the names of the faithful departed (Schwartz, 1967, pp. 115-25), and a version of the hymn Gloria in excelsis Deo (C19, unpublished).

As the site of Bulayïq is that of a monastery, it is natural that its library included many homilies and treatises concerning asceticism and the religious life. Such texts are difficult to identify precisely when, as is usual, no title or colophon is preserved. Some unidentified Sogdian texts of this kind have been published (e.g., Müller and Lentz, pp. 532-34, a fragment concerning Daniel probably belonging to a text on fasting; Schwartz, 1967, pp. 145-50, a “discourse against evil thoughts”; Sims-Williams, 1985, pp. 69-77, on the three stages of the contemplative life). Works of known authorship or attribution include the Antirrheticus of Evagrius (Sims-Williams, 1985, pp. 168-82) and fragments of the writings of Macarius the Egyptian and of Abbā Isaiah (Sims-Williams, 1985, pp. 165-67). The high esteem in which Abbā Isaiah was held is even more clearly indicated by the survival in two Sogdian manuscripts (one published; Sims-Williams, 1985, pp. 78-86) of excerpts from Dādišoʿ Qaṭrāyā’s commentary on his works.

The extensive hagiographical literature that was translated into Sogdian includes fragments of many widely diffused texts like the apocryphal Acts of Peter (Müller and Lentz, pp. 528-31); the legends of the invention of the cross (Müller and Lentz, , pp. 513-21) and of the Sleepers of Ephesus (Sims-Williams, 1985, pp. 154-57); and the martyrdoms of Eustathius (ibid., pp. 158-64), Sergius and Bacchus (Müller and Lentz, pp. 520-22), Cyriacus and Julitta (C22, unpublished), and George (Hansen, 1941; for important corrections to this edition, see Gershevitch; Benveniste). The Sogdian manuscripts also include passages from the Apophthegmata patrum, the edifying sayings and anecdotes of the earliest monks and solitaries (Schwartz, 1967, pp. 42-52; Sims-Williams, 1985, pp. 124-36), and several biographies of those who were regarded as playing an important part in the history of monasticism and its spread from the west to the east, for example, Serapion (C3 and C27, both unpublished), Eugenius (Sundermann, forthcoming), John of Deylam, founder of two monasteries in Fārs (Sundermann, 1976), and Baršabbā, to whom the Sogdian version of the legend (Müller and Lentz, pp. 523-28) attributes the foundation of Christian communities in an area extending eastward as far as Balḵ. Other hagiographical texts with an Iranian setting include the Acts of the Persian martyrs under Šāpūr II (Schwartz, 1970, pp. 391-94; Sims-Williams, 1985, pp. 137-53) and the martyrdom of Pethion (Sims-Williams, 1985, pp. 31-68, 185).

Other miscellaneous texts remain to be mentioned, for example, the Apostolic Canons (Sims-Williams, 1985, pp. 101-9), a commentary on the symbolism of the baptismal and eucharistic liturgies (Sims-Williams, 1985, 110-20), translations of Syriac metrical homilies (a memrā “On the final evil hour” by Bābay of Nisibis [Sims-Williams, 1985, pp. 87-100], a poem (?) on the mercy of God [Sims-Williams, 1985, pp. 121-23], a poem on patience [Müller and Lentz, pp. 535-38]), a collection of riddles on biblical themes (Sundermann, 1988), and a small fragment of an oracle book of the type known in the west as the sortesa apostolorum (Sims-Williams, 1976, pp. 63-65). This last manuscript was not found in the Turfan area but in the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas (q.v.) at Tun-huang, where Chinese and Sogdian documents attest the presence of a substantial number of Christians in the 9th and 10th centuries (see iii, above).

The Christian Sogdian literature consists almost entirely of translations from Syriac, in which Syriac words, especially technical terms, are freely used (see Sims-Williams, 1988) and Syriac syntax is sometimes followed slavishly; its literary value is therefore in general slight. Special significance attaches to those texts of which the Syriac originals appear to have been lost, like the legend of Baršabbā (of which only a fragment is extant in Syriac), the poem by Bābay, and the collection of riddles. In some cases the Sogdian version sheds light on the textual history of the underlying Syriac text, as in the account of the martyrdom of George (the Sogdian text of which shares with the Greek and other versions certain details absent from the Syriac, like a reference to George’s belt; Gershevitch, p. 180) or the commentary on baptism and eucharist (Sims-Williams, 1985, pp. 110-12; Brock, 1980; idem, 1986). More generally, the Christian Sogdian texts are of great importance as evidence for the existence and nature of Christian communities that would otherwise be virtually unknown. Linguistically, too, they provide unique information, in particular through the use of the Syriac alphabet and the Nestorian system of diacritical points (^: = ā, ̇ = ă, y^: = ē̆, y_. = ī̆, ẇ = ō̆, ẉ = ū̆), which permits more precise indication of the vowels than is possible in Manichean or Sogdian script, where long vowels are represented only by consonants (ʾ, y, w) and short vowels are often not marked at all.

(For a more detailed account of the Christian Sogdian literature see Sims-Williams, forthcoming; earlier surveys by Hansen [1968] and Asmussen contain a number of inaccuracies, including incorrect identifications of texts.)

CHRISTIANITY v. Christ in Manicheism

In Manicheism, as in earlier gnostic systems, the terms Christ (Gk. “the anointed”) and Jesus Christ were used in various ways, though less commonly than the name Jesus alone. The epithet Christ can be properly understood only in conjunction with the name Jesus, and the latter will therefore also be considered briefly here.

Jesus in Manichean doctrine. In the original Christian usage the proper name Jesus (traditionally interpreted as “Yahweh is help”) might or might not be accompanied by the epithet Christ or Messiah, but Christ was also used alone, as if it were a name in itself. Through the use of such epithets the fathers of the primitive church expressed their conviction that in Jesus Israel’s hope for an eschatological redeemer had been fulfilled. In gnostic teachings, on the other hand, there was a strong tendency to separate the earthly Jesus, that is, the man Jesus of Nazareth, from the heavenly Christ, the cosmic savior (Rudolph, pp. 148-71), a distinction that may already have been foreshadowed in the Jewish Christian Elchasaite community in which Mani grew up (see alchasai) by the idea of a cosmic Jesus suffering in earth and water (Koenen, 1978, pp. 181-90). In Manicheism the Christian notion of Jesus’s unique sacrifice is not encountered, and it therefore seems that Jesus was not essential to Manichean doctrine. Actually, however, he was one of the most popular figures in Manichean writings, and at least six different aspects can be distinguished (cf. Puech, pp. 81-84; Boyce, Reader, p. 10), all of which were of great importance for Manichean belief and worship.

1. Jesus the Splendor (Aram.-Syr. Yišōʿ Zīwā in Parthian texts) is the savior who redeems the light imprisoned in man; the Redeeming Intelligence, the Great Nous, is his emanation (Polotsky and Böhlig, p. 35.18-24; Alexander of Lykopolis, p. 34.21, does not distinguish between the two). Jesus the Splendor is one of the redeeming deities of the “third evocation” (a series of deities evoked by the Father of Greatness for the purpose of salvation; see, e.g., Boyce, Reader, p. 10) and is regarded as an emanation of the Third Messenger, first member of the third evocation (Polotsky and Böhlig, p. 35.13-14), but, because of his great importance and multiple functions, his position in the divine hierarchy is sometimes represented differently, for instance, as Son of the Greatness (i.e., of the Father of Greatness) or Son of the first Man (second member of the “first evocation”; see, e.g., Boyce, Reader, p. 9).

2. The suffering Jesus (Jesus patibilis) is identical with the Living Self, that is, the light that is imprisoned in matter; like the historical Jesus he is depicted as crucified in the world.

3. The historical Jesus of Nazareth is believed to have appeared on earth as an apostle of light in human shape, proclaiming the truth and performing miracles. The belief that during his earthly existence he only seemed to submit to suffering and death reflects the common docetic christology of gnosticism, which is based on the assumption that Jesus had no human body but only a spiritual one. Many vivid descriptions of his passion and death seem to belie this claim, and it cannot be excluded that even Manicheans took them at face value. In other instances, however, the docetic character of the Manichean image of Jesus is unequivocally stated (cf. Rose, pp. 120-28). In one Parthian text Christ’s changing of “form and appearance” is called a mystery (rāz; text M 24 in Henning, 1944, p. 112), which recalls Augustine’s mention of Christ’s mystica passio (Contra Faustum Manichaeum 33.1). Jesus’s apparent corporeal existence allows the conclusion that Jesus on earth was no more than a transformation of Jesus the Splendor.

4. The risen, or eschatological, Jesus will rule over humanity for 120 years after his final judgment and before the great conflagration purifies the remaining redeemable light. It is clear from the Coptic sermon on the Great War, in which Jesus the Splendor himself is depicted as rendering the Last Judgment, that this aspect was also closely connected with the first (Polotsky, 1934, p. 37.4).

5. Jesus the child is also described as an emanation of Jesus the Splendor (Polotsky and Böhlig, pp. 92.7-8, 35.27-30). He is best explained as the personification of the soul’s will to redemption (Mir. Man. III, p. 878 n. 4; cf. Pedersen, pp. 177-78). There is clearly a link between Jesus patibilis and Jesus the Child, but the problem requires further investigation.

6. As Jesus the Splendor has his cosmic seat in the moon (Polotsky, 1935), at least in popular belief, the moon is identified with Jesus the Splendor. One Sogdian text contains the phrase “in the evening, when Jesus [the moon] rose” (Sundermann, 1981, p. 47.541 and n. 5).

All aspects of the Manichean Jesus image can thus be subsumed under the concepts of a redeeming and a suffering cosmic figure. Through them Jesus becomes almost omnipresent in Manichean cosmology and the classical type of the “redeemed redeemer,” an idea ascribed to gnostic thinking (e.g., Rudolph, pp. 121-31). On the other hand, in most of his aspects Jesus may be replaced by more precise mythological entities: Jesus the Splendor is represented as the Great Nous, Jesus patibilis as the World Soul, Jesus the child as the Enthymesis of Life, Jesus the Moon as the moon (Mid. Pers. and Parth. māh, Sogd. māx), and so on.

The epithets Christ and Messiah. In the western Manichean tradition, represented principally by Greek, Latin, and Coptic texts, the Greek name Khristós is used for Jesus. There are several instances in the Greek Mani codex in Cologne (Cirillo et al., p. 227), though all but one (p. 66.4) are quotations from the letters of Paul. According to Alexander of Lykopolis (p. 34.18-21), the Manicheans called him Khrēstós (lit. “noble, excellent, good”; cf. van der Horst, pp. 91-92), but this form, though not completely without parallels in the original Manichean literature (Polotsky, 1934, p. 72.9; idem, 1935), was not the only one current in the Greek-speaking world. From the Greek came the Coptic p-khristos (see Allberry, p. 45) and the Latin xpi (for Christi) and xpo (for Christo; Merkelbach, 1988, pp. 255, 256). As in Christian usage, the epithet Christ can accompany the name of Jesus or stand alone.

In the Mesopotamian and eastern tradition of Manicheism, represented principally by Iranian, Turkish, and Chinese texts, the original Aramaic form mšyḥʾ (Mšīḥā) is preferred; it is attested as mšy[ḥʾ] in an Aramaic inscription on a Manichean rock-crystal intaglio (Decret, p. 70). From Aramaic it passed into Parthian as mšyhʾḫ, mšyhʾ, and mšyhʾʾ (Boyce, 1977, p. 58; Sundermann, 1981, p. 165; *mšyxʾ in Sogdian script in ms. 12398 l. 2), represented in the “cantillated” text M 53 (verso l. 12) as mʾ-YGʾ-°šy-y-y-hʾ), which points to the pronunciation Mašīhā. These forms were adopted in Manichean Sogdian mšʾy-xʾ and mšyxʾ (Sogdian script) and mšyhʾ(ḫ) (Manichean script; Sundermann, 1981, p. 185). In Old Turkish both *mšyhʾ (Manichean script) and *mšyxʾ (Sogdian script; Zieme, p. 76, ms. U 189, recto l. 6) appear. In Manichean Middle Persian Mšīḥā, like other Aramaic words, is very rarely used (cf. Sundermann, 1979, p. 103); only three exceptions are known (Henning, 1943, p. 58, text A l. 154; ibid., M 325 l. 3 and M 6230 l. 10; the form mʾm wsyn in M 28 II verso i l. 2 has been regarded as an abbreviation; cf. Mir. Man. II, p. 315 n. 7). Forms found in non- or anti-Manichean sources in other languages, for example, Arabic and New Persian Masīḥ (Taqīzāda and Afšār Šīrāzī, p. 580), can all be derived from these forms in the Manichean literature. As in Christian usage, the terms Christ and Messiah can accompany the name Jesus or stand alone.

In Middle Persian texts the term Aryāmān is also used for Christ and Xradišahr(-yazad) for Jesus or Jesus Christ. Aryāmān (lit. “friend”; cf. Pahl. ērmān “friend”) is one of the names that Mani borrowed from Zoroastrianism; the Zoroastrian Aryāmān (see airyaman) is the deity named at the beginning of the ā Airiāmā īšiiō (see airyaman išya) prayer. It is quite likely that Mani chose this name partly because of the similarity in sound between the two phrases Aryāmān Yisōʿ (found beside Yisōʿ Aryāmān) and Airiiāmā išiiō (Schaeder, p. 129 n. 1; Wesendonk, p. 158). The equivalence of Aryāmān and Christ follows from the Greek and Middle Persian versions of the formula “I am Mani, the apostle of Jesus Christ [Gk.]/Jesus Aryāmān [Mid. Pers.].” Mani invented the name Xradišahr(-yazad) “(God of) the world of wisdom,” that is, of the Light Nous, in his Šābuhragān (the only book Mani wrote in Middle Persian, presumably in order to expound his teaching to Šāpūr I; cf. Sundermann, 1979, p. 132 n. 234); there is no evidence, however, to show that this term is also equivalent to Christ.

Usage of the epithets. Opinions about the significance of the name Jesus and the epithets Christ and Messiah have evolved with the growing body of original Manichean literature discovered in this century. In the early 19th century F. C. Baur surmised (pp. 71-77, 203-238) that the name Jesus was linked with the suffering aspect and Christ and Messiah with salvation. The new material does not bear out such a clear-cut distinction, however. Recently Eugen Rose suggested (p. 57) that the two words are used interchangeably in the literature, though the savior is commonly referred to as Jesus; Rose’s definition of Jesus Christ (based on that of Augustine) as the “cosmic” deity does not cover the whole range of usage, however, nor does J. Ries’s definition of Jesus Christ as the “worldly Jesus” (1978, p. 323; cf. Boyce, Reader, p. 10). In fact the terms Jesus, Christ, and Jesus Christ were often used interchangeably, and none was reserved for any particular aspect.

In both Coptic and Iranian texts Christ and Messiah designate the first aspect of Jesus, Jesus the Splendor. Christ is one of the savior deities of the Manichean pantheon who are continually invoked in hymns (e.g., the Coptic psalm to Christ; Allberry, pp. 116-17). In a Parthian hymn (M 369, Waldschmitt and Lentz, p. 118; Boyce, Reader, p. 123) Jesus is called Yišōʿ Zīwā. In an unpublished Parthian manuscript (M 6598, ll. 3-4) the expression čyhrg mšyhʾ “the appearance of Messiah” seems to refer to the Virgin of Light, another member of the “third evocation” and most closely associated with Jesus the Splendor (Waldschmitt and Lentz, pp. 55-56, 62; Polotsky, 1934, p. 86.10-11).

The designation of the second aspect of Jesus, the suffering Jesus (cf. Koenen, pp. 176-84; Rose, p. 92), as Christ or Messiah is known mainly from texts of Christian origin (Augustine, Contra Faustum Manichaeum 2.5, 20.11; Evodius, De Fide 36; cf. Baur, pp. 72-74). The original Manichean texts are less straightforward. There is clear evidence, however, that the suffering Jesus could be called Messiah (cf. the Parthian hymn “Worthy art thou of worship,” in which the Living Self, Viva Anima, is called Messiah; Waldschmitt and Lentz, p. 105).

The use of Christ and Messiah to designate the third aspect of the Manichean Jesus, the historical Jesus of Nazareth, is perhaps the best attested. In the Middle Persian version of the Book of the Giants Mšīḥā is listed as the immediate predecessor of Mani in the sequence of prophets (after Seth, Zoroaster, and the Buddha) who revealed the truth to mankind (Henning, 1943, p. 58 ll. 152-55; tr. p. 63). In Parthian texts describing the last days and hours in the life of Jesus he is referred to as yyšwʿ mšyhʾh (Sundermann, 1981, ll. 1013, 1126-27, 1134). In a Sogdian text relating miracles performed by Jesus he is called mšyxʿ (Sundermann, 1981, ll. 522, 528, 592).

In some passages the epithet Christ clearly designates the fourth aspect of Jesus, the eschatological Jesus, who will rule over humanity for 120 years (unpublished Parth. ms. M 35 recto ll. 13-14). Probably also belonging to this category is the reference in a Parthian magical text in which “Lord Jesus Christ” (xwdʾy yyšw mšyh[ʾ]) is called upon together with Mani and the archangels to smite demons, sickness, and other evil (Henning, 1947, p. 50 l. 2). The name Aryāmān, which in Middle Persian usually replaces Christ, is used in the phrase yyšwʿ ʾryʾmʾn Jesus Aryāmān (Jesus Christ), for example, in the Middle Persian version of the opening words of the Living Gospel (ʾn mʾny prystg ʿyg yyšwʿ ʾryʾmʾn “I am Mani, the apostle of Jesus Aryāmān“; Mid. Pers. ms. M 17 verso, i ll. 4-6; cf. Müller, p. 26; Cirillo et al., p. 66.4-5; Koenen and Römer, pp. 44-45: “I am Manikhaios, the apostle of Jesus Christ”) and in the exordium of the Seal Letter (mʾny prystg *yyšwʿ ʾryʾmʾn “Mani, the apostle of Jesus Aryāmān”; Mid. Pers. ms. M 1313 recto ll. 7-8). The phrase is apparently an imitation of the opening words of the letters of Paul, whose theology was well known to Mani. Jesus Aryāmān thus most probably has the same significance as the name Jesus in Paul’s letters: the risen, or eschatological, savior. Less obvious is the reference in M 36 verso l. 7 (Mir. Man. II, p. 325), in which the “highest I” (gryw bwrzyst), the World Soul, seems to be called pws ʾryʾmʾn yyš[wʿ]; according to W. B. Henning, the phrase means “the son of Jesus Aryāmān,” but it is more probably to be interpreted as “the son [of god], Aryāmān Jesus” (P. O. Skjærvø, personal communication) or “the son [of man], Aryāmān Jesus,” that is, the son of the first Man in Manichean terminology. Aryāmān is sometimes represented as the friend of man, which is the literal meaning of the name. In this sense the translation corresponds precisely to the Manichean characterization of Jesus as “friend, beloved” (e.g., Parth. fryʾng “beloved”; Chinese shàn zhī shì zhê, lit. “he who knows and recognizes good,” corresponds to kalyāβamitra “friend” in Buddhist texts; P. O. Skjærvø, personal communication), that is, Jesus the Splendor. Coptic p-meritʾ “the beloved” denotes the eschatological Jesus, as does especially Syriac/Aramaic ḥaβīβā “friend, beloved,” which in The Book of Scholia of Bar Kōnay (p. 317.20) also denotes Jesus the Splendor, who wakes Adam (Puech, p. 81).

In late Manichean texts Mani himself is glorified as the God Messiah returned (bg mšyh; Henning, 1937, p. 19 l. 46), and in the Parthian text M 5691 (ll. 3-4) mšyhʾn rwšnʾn “the bright Messiahs” are mentioned along with the qʾwʾn hynzʾwrʾn “the mighty Giants,” apparently as an indeterminate group of mythological figures.

The evidence culled from the many and varied Manichean texts suggests the following development of the use of the terms Christ, Messiah, and Aryāmān in Manicheism. First, in texts based on precise Christian sources it was used as in the Judeo-Christian tradition, as a title for Jesus of Nazareth or for the risen, eschatological Jesus. There are even texts in which Christ is still interpreted as a Jewish title for the king of the people of God (Sundermann, 1968, p. 395; idem, 1981, ll. 1188-91). Next, in general Manichean usage, it also became the highest title for Jesus the Splendor and less often for suffering Jesus. Only Jesus the child and Jesus the Moon are not called Christ in any of the known texts. Most often the term designated the active Jesus, the savior, in his various manifestations (aspects 1, 3, 4). In Middle Persian Manichean texts Messiah is almost completely replaced by Aryāmān. Finally, in eastern Manicheism it came to be used simply as a high honorific title that could be applied to Mani or even an unspecific category of divine beings.

On the whole, however, Christ and Messiah were used less often than Jesus and never in set expressions like the Middle Persian yyšwʿ zyndkr “Jesus the giver of life,” yyšwʿ ʿspyxtʾn “Jesus the Splendor,” Parthian yyšwʿ fryʾng “Jesus the friend,” or Coptic iēs p-papeau “Jesus the magnificent.” (There is no instance of Christus patibilis, as Baur assumed; see Rose, p. 95.) The contrast drawn by the 4th/10th-century writer Ebn al-Nadīm, in a passage allegedly quoted from Mani’s Book of Mysteries, between ʿĪsā (Jesus) and ḥabīb “friend,” on one hand, and Masīḥ (Messiah), the son of the widow who suffered crucifixion, on the other, has no parallel in the original Manichean literature (ed. Flügel, pp. 72, 102; tr. Dodge, pp. 797-98).

CHRISTIANITY vi. In Persian Literature

References to Christianity can be found in Persian literature from the earliest period. Christian beliefs and institutions are frequently mentioned in various genres (lyric, epic, didactic, mystic), and many works contain allusions to legends of Christian saints, martyrs, and ascetics.

Some of the references and vocabulary, particularly those taken from the Koran and related literature (e.g., commentaries on the Koran) and from pre-Islamic Arabic poetry by Christian Arabs, reflect the Arab view of Christianity prevalent in Arabia, Yemen, Abyssinia, and Syria in the 6th and 7th centuries. Often they appear to have been connected with the apocryphal gospels, and sometimes they have a polemical tone, most notably when the Trinity and monotheism are involved. This material is among the legacies of Islam to the fund of Persian literature.

The Islamic heritage is not, however, the only source for the knowledge of Christian beliefs, institutions, behavior, and vocabulary mirrored in the Islamic literature of Persia. Christianity had a long history in pre-Islamic Persia, apparently beginning in the Parthian period (171 b.c.e.-224 c.e.; see arsacids). In the Sesanian period (224-650 c.e.), despite some intervals of harsh persecution, Christian (mainly Nestorian) communities maintained church organizations with generally independent leadership in several regions of the empire (see i-iv, above). Memories of Christian activity in pre-Islamic Persia were an important factor shaping the understanding of Christian customs and institutions expressed in the Persian literature of the Islamic period. In addition, contacts with contemporary Christians living in Persia, Muslim propaganda and disputation with Christian theologians, and even indirect influences from gnostic and Manichean sources during the last two centuries of the Sasanian empire and the early centuries of Islam all had an impact. For example, in works like the Dēnkard and the Škand-gumānīg wizār reflections of the conflict between Christianity and the official Mazdean religion in Sasanian times throw light on how some terms were transmitted from pre-Islamic Persia.

Persian attitudes toward Christians and Christianity. Anti-Christian polemics can also be recognized in certain works written in the Islamic period, for example, Abu’l-Maʿālī’s Bayān al-adyān (comp. 475/1082-83) and Rāzī’s Tabṣerat al-ʿawāmm (first half of the 7th/13th century), but it seems that there was little hostility or fanatical opposition to the ahl-e ḏemma (non-Muslims under Muslim protection) in Persia between the rise of the Samanids (204-395/819-1005) in Khorasan and Transoxania and the conquest of Persia by the Saljuqs in 429-47/1038-55. (On Christians in Persia in the first four centuries of the Islamic period, see Spuler, Iran, pp. 209-15).

Although Persia never faced any direct danger from the Crusades (488-690/1095-1291), the conquest of the holy land by European Christians in 492/1099 was deeply resented. This resentment was voiced in an Arabic qaṣīda by the contemporary poet Abu’l-Moẓaffar Abīvardī (quoted in Ebn al-Aṯīr, X, pp. 284-86), and the loss of Jerusalem was mentioned with sorrow in Toḥfat al-molūk, which has been attributed to Ḡazālī (450-505/1058-1111; Forūzānfar, pp. 330-31). Neẓāmī (535-605/1140-1209) wrote scornfully of the “Franks in Palestine” (1316 Š./1937, p. 525), and Saʿdī (ca. 606-690/1208-91) expressed similar contempt and disgust in the story of his supposed capture by the Franks in the desert of Jerusalem (Golestān, chap. 2, anecdote 31). These expressions attest the impact of the Crusades in changing the relatively tolerant attitude of Muslims toward Christians that had prevailed in the early Islamic centuries.

The Il-khanid rulers of Persia (654-736/1256-1336) before Ḡāzān Khan (694-703/1295-1304) were not Muslims; they and their officials established links with both oriental and occidental Christians, and Christian rulers in Asia Minor and western Europe cherished hopes of an alliance with them against Islam (see Spuler, Mongolen ³, pp. 198-235). Few traces of animosity against Christians can be found in the Persian literature of the period. In fact, it was in the reign of the Il-khanid Gayḵātū (690-94/1291-95) that the Diatessaron, a harmony of the Gospels, was translated into Persian from Syriac by Īwannīs ʿEzz-al-Dīn Moḥammad b. Moẓaffar of Tabrīz (see bible vii. persian translations of the bible; on the dissemination of the Diatessaron and the Persian manuscript, see Messina). The fact that such a work could be undertaken at all suggests that the traditional tolerance of Christians still persisted in Persia in the Il-khanid period. The published text contains indications that there were large numbers of “baptized people” (ʿemādadārān, i.e., Nestorians, Armenians, etc.), and Christian monasteries were to be found in several regions of Persia, from Māzandarān to Nīšāpūr, Ṭūs, and Herat. It is possible that the Il-khanid policy of general toleration and the efforts of Christians (and Jews) to collaborate with Mongol rulers and governors against Islam inhibited expression of anti-Christian feelings in Persia under the early Il-khanids.

In the later Safavid period, after ʿAbbās I (r. 996-1038/1588-1629), and in post-Safavid times there appears to have been a relative decline in tolerance. One symptom was the appearance of polemical books refuting Christian teachings. ʿAbbās I favored his Armenian and Georgian subjects, granted licenses to foreign missionaries, and even discussed religion with them; he allowed almost continuous traffic of European merchants and travelers to and from Persia and exchanged diplomatic missions with royal courts of Europe, in the hope of forming alliances with them against the Ottoman empire. The Englishman Sir Anthony Sherley was included in one of the shah’s European missions in 1007/1598; another member of the same mission, Orūj Bīg Bayāt, defected to Spain in 1011/1602 and converted to Christianity, taking the name Don Juan. His memoirs were published in Spanish in 1013/1604 (tr. G. Le Strange, Don Juan of Persia, London, 1926; tr. M. Rajabnīā, Don Žovān-e Īrānī, Tehran, 1338 Š./1959; for ʿAbbās I’s dealings with his Christian subjects, Roman Catholic monks, and European states, see Falsafī, pp. 7-97). The freedom of activity granted by ʿAbbās I to such missionary orders as the Carmelites, the Capuchins, and the Augustinians aroused the sensitivities of the Islamic ʿolamāʾ (religious scholars), who became apprehensive about the activities of Christians in general and European missionaries in particular (see viii, below).

Some of them wrote refutations of works in Persian by foreign missionaries, for example, Āʾīna-ye ḥaqqnomā (ca. 1018/1609) by Jerome Xavier (d. 1617). One of the most prominent polemicists was Sayyed Aḥmad ʿAlawī (d. 1069/1658-59), a pupil of the Eṣfahānī philosopher Mīr(-e) Dāmād who wrote Meṣqal-e ṣafā. Works of this kind were both numerous and influential under the Safavids and remained so until late in the Qajar period. In the 13th/19th century several Protestant missionaries wrote works in Persian (see conversions iii. to christianity (protestant)): The Englishman Henry Martyn wrote Mīzān al-ḥaqq, (Shiraz, 1226/1811), the Swiss C. G. Pfander wrote a work also entitled Mīzān al-ḥaqq (2nd ed., London, 1862), and W. St. Clair-Tisdall, also an Englishman, wrote Yanābīʿ al-Eslām (Punjab, 1317/1899). Mollā Aḥmad Narāqī (d. 1244/1828-29), a prominent mojtahed (religious leader) of the early Qajar period wrote Resāla-ye sayf al-omma (lith. ed., Tehran, 1267/1850-51) in response to Martyn; Shaikh Ḥosayn b. ʿAbd-al-ʿAlī Tūtūṇčī Tabrīzī wrote Ezālat al-wasāwes (Tabrīz, 1351/1932-33) in reply to Pfander; and Shaikh Aḥmad Šāhrūdī wrote Ezālat al-awhām fī jawāb Yanābīʿ al-Eslām (1344/1925-26) in refutation of St. Clair-Tisdall (see Āryān, 1335 Š./1956).

Christian elements in classical Persian literature. Contentious matter seldom entered into Persian poetry and belles lettres in the era of relative tolerance before the late Safavid period. Many verse and prose works provide evidence of a long familiarity with Christianity in its oriental, mainly Nestorian, forms. They contain stories and references to Jesus (ʿĪsā) that appear to have been derived from the Gospels; the authors must have learned of them from written or oral sources connected with Christian circles. Noteworthy examples are Jesus’s words to a murdered man lying on the road in a qeṭʿa ascribed to Rūdakī of Samarkand (d. 329/941; p. 20, qeṭʿa 10), which recall his sayings in Matthew 26:52 and Luke 6:31; Saʿdī’s story of Jesus’s coming to a hermit’s cell and God’s pardoning a sinner and punishing the self-righteous hermit (Būstān, chapter 4, anecdote 4), which recalls the parable of the Pharisee and the tax gatherer in Luke 18:10-14; and the verse in which Ḥāfeẓ (ca. 726-92/1326-90; Dīvān, ed. Qazvīnī, ḡazal 142, v. 9) wrote that, “if the grace of the Holy Spirit comes to our help again, others will do as the Messiah did,” probably echoes John 14:12. These and other references to Jesus in the Dīvān of the Ismaʿili poet Nāṣer-e Ḵosrow (d. 470/1077), the Ḥadīqat al-ḥaqīqa of Sanāʾī (d. ca. 526/1131), the Maṯnawī of Jalāl-al-Dīn Rūmī (604-72/1207-73), the Būstān of Saʿdī, and elsewhere suggest that the poets or their informants had direct knowledge of Christianity.

It is certain that some of the classical poets, like Rūdakī and Kesāʾī of Marv (d. 391/1001), had lived in proximity to Christian communities in their native cities (on Samarkand, see Ebn Ḥawqal, p. 372; on Marv, see Bīrūnī, Āṯār p. 389). Their ready references to Jesus and Christian monks can thus be easily explained. As a native of Ṭūs, Ferdowsī (ca. 329-411/940-1020) must also have been in touch with the Christian community, which in his time had a street of its own (kūy-e tarsāyān) in the town (Meyhanī, I, p. 59); nevertheless, his Christian references in the Šāh-nāma generally echoed statements and sentiments that he found in his sources. For example, in one passage he derided Jesus’s teaching of nonresistance (Moscow ed., IX pp. 95-96, vv. 460-64), and in another he called Jesus the deceiving (farībanda) Messiah and wrote disparagingly of his execution by the Jews (Moscow ed., VIII, p. 105, vv. 894-96, cf. IX, p. 96, vv. 1474-75). On the other hand, in some contexts he expressed a more broad-minded view, for instance, in the story of Alexander and Keyd the Indian (Moscow ed., VII, pp. 16-17 vv. 180-84).

Nāṣer-e Ḵosrow, who was born at Qobādīān near Marv and made a long journey to Syria and Egypt, was keenly interested in theological and philosophical questions and must have acquired a relatively profound knowledge of Christian doctrines. He mentioned Christianity in many passages in his Dīvān and his Rowšanāʾī-nāma. Another poet of the same period, Moʿezzī (440-542/1049-1148), also showed a special interest in Christianity and Christians, perhaps partly because of his familiarity with Christian communities in Nīšāpūr and Marv, the towns where he spent most of his life; in addition, first his father, Borhānī, and then he himself served as poet laureate (amīr al-šoʿarāʾ) at the court of the Saljuq sultans Alp Arslān (455-65/1063-72) and Malekšāh (465-85/1072-92), who were frequently at war with the Byzantines. Alp Arslān’s great victory and capture of the emperor Romanus Diogenes (r. 1067-71) at the battle of Manzikert (Malāzgerd) in 463/1071 was described by the Saljuq court poets as a glorious achievement; Moʿezzī showed great interest in Christian customs and monarchies, but his comments are more anti-Byzantine than anti-Christian in tone.

Neẓāmī of Ganja recounted a story about Jesus’s encounter with a dead dog lying on the road (Maḵzan al-asrār, p. 129), which became so well known that it passed into European literature (as in Goethe’s West-östlicher Divan). The story was based on one of Jesus’s sayings in the Gospel of Matthew (7:3-5), which suggests that Neẓāmī’s knowledge of Christianity was not limited to the information given in the Koran and related literature; but his references to Christianity in Šīrīn o Ḵosrow and his Eskandar-nāma do not provide much additional information about his sources. His reticence may have been owing to religious strife in the region of Ganja, which he mentioned in some of his works. Even so, his relative silence on the subject of Christianity seems surprising in a poet who, as his Eskandar-nāma shows, was well acquainted with the Greco-Roman cultural legacy in the form in which it had been inherited by the Muslims (Bausani, pp. 688 ff.).

In marked contrast, the poet Ḵāqānī Šervānī (ca. 520-95/1126-99), Neẓāmī’s contemporary, showed exceptional readiness to disclose his knowledge of Christianity. His mother was a Nestorian convert to Islam, and he himself, it seems from his Dīvān, was interested in theological questions and well informed about the rituals and customs of contemporary oriental Christianity (Rypka, Hist. Iran. Lit., pp. 202-3). Scattered references to such issues can be found in most of his poems. The famous qaṣīda entitled Ḥabsīya or Tarsāʾīya, which he addressed to “the grandee of Rūm” (ʿaẓīm al-Rūm), a Byzantine prince (probably Andronicus Comnenus) who had recently arrived in Šervān, is so full of Christian words and phrases and references to Christian beliefs and ceremonies that it cannot be understood without knowledge of these matters (Minorsky).

The attitude of Sufis, as of other Muslims, toward Christianity was rooted in antitrinitarian conviction but generally characterized by tolerance. In most of the Persian Sufi literature a tendency to favor peaceful coexistence among different religions can be observed. One curious feature is the number of stories about love for a beautiful Christian, a love that can drive even a Muslim shaikh to become or pretend to become a Christian (Forūzānfar, pp. 322-26). The best example is the story of Shaikh Ṣaṇʿān and the Christian girl in Manṭeq al-ṭayr by ʿAṭṭār (ca. 540-618/1145-1221). The number of similar anecdotes in Persian verse and prose works is by no means small (cf. Forūzānfar, pp. 387-88). Persian Sufi authors often showed exceptional interest in Christian beliefs and institutions. Sanāʾī (pp. 80, 185, 381-94, 417) revered Jesus, whom he called the rūḥ (spirit), and in several passages he expressed respect for Christians, whom he placed together with Zoroastrians among the travelers on the right path and seekers of the one truth (p. 92). ʿAṭṭār also considered Christians capable of attaining salvation, even though in the story of Shaikh Ṣaṇʿān he called them idolaters, perhaps meaning simply worshipers of icons, and derided their belief in God’s having had a son (Elāhī-nāma, discourse 3; Kollīyāt, III). In one qaṣīda (Dīvān, pp. 278-79) he even went so far as to describe monks as knowers of the mysteries of the love for God, which breaks the bonds of worldly attachment. His refutations and criticisms of Christian belief have none of the asperity to be found in the writings of doctrinaire theologians and faqīhs. Jalāl-al-Dīn Rūmī told many edifying stories about Jesus, some of which were taken from the Gospels (1925, index, s.v. ʿĪsā, bk. 21, v. 4). Stories found in the work of Aflākī (ca. 690-761/1291-1360) suggest that Rūmī maintained generally friendly relations with the Christians at Konya and elsewhere in Asia Minor (e.g., pp. 591-93, 610-11; but cf. Rūmī, 1951, p. 124). On the whole Rūmī took a more favorable view of Christianity than of Judaism. Shaikh Maḥmūd Šabestarī (d. 720/1320), on the other hand, showed particular interest in Christianity and a sympathetic attitude toward Christians. In his explanation of the symbolic imagery of Sufism he cited a number of Christian examples and sayings as capable of interpretation or application in a Sufi sense.

In Persian lyric poetry, which was strongly influenced by Sufism, Christians and Christianity were connected with the themes of love and wine. As Christians (and also Zoroastrians and Jews) living in the Dār al-Eslām were allowed to make and sell wine for their own use, monasteries and the behavior of Christian young people were viewed by Muslims as typifying hedonism and profligacy. In the symbolic vocabulary of the Sufis the monastery (dayr) became a metaphor for the hospice (ḵānqāh) of the Sufis, the Christian (tarsā) for a person unconstrained by Islamic law, the young Christian (tarsā-bačča) for a shaikh or spiritual guide (moršed) who enchants the desiring disciple (morīd) and frees him from worldly bonds. Such lyric symbolism imparts a perplexing ambiguity to the ḡazals of poets like Sanāʾī, ʿAṭṭār, ʿErāqī (d. 688/1289), Rūmī, Saʿdī, and Ḥāfeẓ.

Perhaps the last use of Christian terminology in classical Persian poetry is in the well-known Tarjīʿ-band of Sayyed Aḥmad Hātef of Isfahan (d. 1198/1783-84), one of the poets who rejected the Indian style popular in his time and reverted to classical Persian models. In the second stanza Hātef not only implied that different religions can be equally true but also used words like “Christian,” “Trinity,” “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” in support of belief in the unity of existence, which he reiterated in the refrain throughout the poem. His expression of such pantheism and use of such words were not considered objectionable in contemporary Shiʿite circles.

As already mentioned, the terminology referring to Christianity in Persian prose and belles lettres falls into two categories: words and phrases that entered Persian from Arabic sources, mainly the Koran, religious literature, and pre-Islamic Christian Arab poetry, and those that appear to have entered as a result of contacts with Christian communities in Persia. Noteworthy examples of the first category are ebn Allāh (son of God), Rūḥ-Allāh, ṯāleṯ ṯalāṯa (third of the three), rūḥ al-qods or qodos (holy spirit), oqnūm (person of the Trinity), enjīl (Gospel), ḥawārī (disciple), rāheb (monk) and rohbān (monks), qessīs (priest), šammās (deacon), osqof (bishop), baṭrīq (patriarch), jāṯalīq (catholicos), ṣalīb (cross), zonnār (girdle), ṭaylasān (pallium), dayr (monastery), ṣawmaʿa (cell), nāqūs (church bell), qandīl (lamp), Fesḥ (Easter), and taʿmīd or maʿmūdīya (baptism). Some of these terms are loanwords that entered Arabic as a result of contacts with Christianity in pre-Islamic and early Islamic times. Persian or persianized forms in the second category are fewer, for example, Angelīūn (Gospel), čalīpā (cross), sokūbā (bishop), kašīš (priest), kelīsa (church), yaldā (winter solstice, i.e., Christmas). Some are of Syriac (or ultimately Greek) origin and must have entered Persian directly, rather than through Arabic.

Also noteworthy is the large number of Persian literary expressions and compounds built on the names ʿĪsā (Jesus), Masīḥ (Messiah), Maryam (Mary), and tarsā, for example, dam-e ʿĪsā (breath of Jesus), noṭq-e ʿĪsā (words of Jesus), morḡ-e ʿĪsā (bird of Jesus, i.e., the bat), ḵom-e ʿĪsā (wine jar of Jesus), ḵar-e ʿĪsā (ass of Jesus), sūzan-e ʿĪsā (needle of Jesus), Masīḥā-nafas (having breath like that of the Messiah), rešta-ye Maryam (Mary’s thread), rūza-ye Maryam (Mary’s fasting, i.e., silence), jāma-ye tarsā (garment of the Christians), dayr-e tarsā (monastery of the Christians), ḵaṭṭ-e tarsā (Greek writing). These expressions are generally noted in Persian dictionaries (cf. Āryān, 1960).

Another sign of the lasting impact of Christianity on the culture and literature of Persia is the abundance of idioms and proverbs reflecting the experience of living beside Christians and the opinions of Muslim Persians about them. Some refer to the dam-e ʿĪsā, ḵom-e ʿĪsā, ḵar-e ʿĪsā, morḡ-e ʿĪsā, noṭq-e ʿĪsā, or the rūḥ al-qods. At least sixty have been noted by ʿA. A. Dehḵodā (s.vv.), and even more are in vernacular use.

CHRISTIANITY vii. Christian Influences in Persian Poetry

Persian poetry contains a good number of allusions to Jesus Christ (ʿĪsā Masīḥ), Mary (Maryam), and Christians (naṣārā, tarsā) in general. But that does not mean that one can speak of Christian influences in the strict sense of the word, for most of the images and ideas expressed in poetry are elaborations of the Koranic data about Jesus and his virgin mother, though sometimes developed very ingeniously. Only among a few poets who had firsthand contact with Christian communities of Persia and Anatolia, such as Ḵāqānī and Rūmī, do some lines betray more intimate knowledge of Christian customs and concepts.

As was the case in early Arabic poetry, the Christian monk is alluded to thus in Kesāʾī Marvazī’s (Rīāḥī, p. 85) comparison of the blue lotus flower (nīlūfar-e kabūd) with a pale monk in his bluish robe. A large number of Christian monasteries (dayr) existed in Iraq and Syria under the caliphs. The pleasant, serene location (e.g., Yāqūt, Boldān II, pp. 658, 660, 666, 669) of such monasteries offered the liberal-minded Muslims and even the caliph himself a safe haven where drinking bouts could be held (e.g., Yāqūt, Boldān II, pp. 649, 658, 663, 693). Many poems were made in Arabic about these monasteries, their residents, and Christian customs. Some people became infatuated by the beauty of the Christian youths (see, e.g., Yāqūt, Boldān II, pp. 662-63), who associated freely with guests and often served as cupbearers. Thus a handsome young monk or Christian boy came to be the beloved who gives wine unstingily, and Christian imagery was used by poets to describe the beloved (see, e.g., Rādūyānī, p. 48; Dehḵodā, s.v. čalīpā).

It is well known that the early Sufis were in close contact with Christian ascetics and that the figure of Jesus plays an important role in early Sufis’ sayings (see Andrae, passim). His kindness and generosity were always praised, a fact that is most notably seen in Neẓāmī’s story (borrowed in German by J. W. von Goethe after H. Hammer-Purgstall’s Geschichte der schönen Redekünste Persiens and then frequently retold in the West): Jesus passed by a dead dog and silenced his disciples’ complaints about its foul smell by pointing to the animal’s beautiful white teeth. In such stories, Jesus appears as the representative of love of God—not, as John the Baptist, of fear of God. This gentle aspect of his character prevails in poetry. Some of the Sufis found the asceticism of Jesus not completely perfect, however, and there was a story that he carried a needle with him, which showed that he had still some relations with the “world” (p. 85). For this reason he was lifted up only to the fourth heaven, not into the immediate presence of God. Such ideas may help explain why Jesus appears in Ḥāfeẓ’s verse as dancing, listening to the music of Zohra (Venus), who is located in the third heaven:

Dar āsmān na ʿajab gar be-gofta-ye Ḥāfeẓ

Samāʿ-e Zohra be-raqṣ āvarad Masīḥā-rā.

The most frequently mentioned miracle of Jesus is his capacity to revive dead bodies, taken from the Koran, which mentions his blowing into clay birds to bring them alive (5:110). This story offers the poets innumerable ways of comparing their beloved to Jesus, and expressing their hope that the beloved would grant them a kiss in order to restore their fading soul, which appears generally under the image of Jesus breathing into them. Sometimes the lover appears as a clay bird brought to life by Jesus’s breath, and understandably his healing power makes him appear as the true physician of the soul. His quickening breath usually appears in connection with Ḵeżr’s water of life—both prophets are immortal and grant life to the mortal lover. Rūmī says in a charming verse (Dīvān -e kabīr IV, p. 121 v. 19180):

Gar ze Masīḥ porsad-at morda če-gūna zenda kard,

Būsa be-dah be-pīš-e ū bar lab-e mā ke ham-čonīn

“If he asks you about the Messiah, how he quickened the dead/Give in his presence a kiss on our lips: Thus!”

In the 13th/19th century Mīrzā Ḡāleb claims: “Ḡāleb died from one movement of his lips./Unfortunately the breath of Jesus was not at hand.” This imagery was so common in later Persian, Turkish, and Urdu poetry that the lover claims to have been killed by the beloved—“and whose Jesus have you been last night?” that is, “Whom have you kissed?”

The idea of the quickening breath can also be applied to the ruler, and Ḵāqānī compares a prince to Jesus, who revives his country “as Jesus revived Lazarus” (Dīvān, p. 146). Ḵāqānī also alludes to the table that was sent down to Jesus in an inverted image stating that even Jesus comes to Ṭāhā’s, that is Moḥammad’s, table to gather the leftover crumbs (Dīvān, p. 99; cf. Koran 5:112, 114). More frequent than allusions to the mysterious table, however, are verses mentioning Jesus’s donkey. In the Golestān Saʿdī had written the oft-quoted lines:

Ḵar-e ʿĪsā gar-aš be Makka barand,

čūn bīāyad hanūz ḵar bāšad

“If Jesus’s donkey went to Mecca,/When he returns, he is still a donkey.”

But much more common is the association of the donkey with the body and Jesus with the soul. This is found dozens of times in Rūmī’s verse: When Jesus went to heaven, his donkey had to stay back on earth. In Rūmī’s verse one finds very coarse association of the donkey’s smelly, foul backside with the fragrance that emerges from Christ, the soul—“what has Jesus’s cradle to do with a donkey’s tail?”

The idea that Jesus is the innermost soul, “a Christ in the cradle of the outward form,” occurs not only in his Dīvān but also in Fīh mā fīh (chap. 5): The “birth of Christ in the soul,” which is preceded by many birth pangs, is an expression used by Rūmī half a century before it appears in the writings of Meister Eckhart. For Jesus is the rūḥ Allāh, God’s spirit, and this leads to admiring verses about the Virgin Mary: Persian poets have loved to allude to her purity, and as early as in Kesāʾī’s poetry (Rīāḥī, p. 77), one finds a description of a spring morning:

Nasīm-e nīm-šabān Jabreʾīl gašt magar,

Ke bīḵ o šāḵ-e deraḵtān-e ḵošk Maryam gašt.

“Perhaps the midnight breeze has become Gabriel/That the roots and the branches of the dried-up trees became Mary.”

The rosebud, too, can be compared to the Virgin, the rose’s fragrance to the life-giving breath of Jesus—ideas repeated many times in the following centuries and especially in Rūmī’s verse. In fact, Rūmī’s description of the Annunciation as told in the Maṯnawī (bk.3, vv. 3700ff.) could be easily taken to be a piece of Christian devotional literature. Mary’s image also helps Rūmī, and others, to show that divine help will come when despair is greatest: Did not the dried-up palm tree shower dates upon her when she grasped it during her birth pangs, as the Koran tells (19:23ff.)?

In Rūmī’s case, there may have been some direct influences from his Christian surroundings; it is known that he conversed with monks and Greek priests who were still very active in Konya and neighboring Cappadocia. He alludes in Fīh mā fīh to the fact that Jesus had no place in which to place his head, while the young jackals had a resting place, but shows the superiority of a lover who is driven from place to place by his beloved to those who may rest peacefully. One finds also an allusion to Matthew (5:59), that one should offer the second cheek after receiving a blow on one cheek (Dīvān I, p. 551.937), and in a strange image he compares the long, confused talk of an Arab to a Christian who confesses the sins of a whole year to a priest (Maṯnawī V, vv. 3255-56).

Yet, despite the positive role of Jesus and Mary, Christianity is usually seen, again in accordance with the Koran, as the religion of monastic otherworldliness, and in Fīh mā fīh (chap. 17) Rūmī warns people who are too weak to take the way of Moḥammad, that is, constant struggle, that they should at least take the way of Christ, for example, to recede from this world. He also criticizes people who cling to their Christian faith and do not acknowledge the superiority of Islam.

The “weakness” of Christianity in the eyes of the poets is shown by combining the word tars “fear” with tarsā “Christian” (Rūmī calls doubtful thought (gomān) “a Christian”), and Ḵāqānī says in an ingenious complaint about the spheres’ revolving: Falak kajrowtar ast az ḵaṭṭ-e tarsā (the sphere goes more crooked than the Christian’s, i.e., the Greek’s, writing, which, of course, goes from left to right and not, like Arabic, from right to left, that is, everything goes wrong).

Verses in which the colorful “world” is compared to a dayr or a church may have been inspired by the colorful iconostases in Orthodox churches—temptingly beautiful and variegated but dangerous for the believer’s soul. In later times the traditional imagery developed in comparisons of questionable taste, as when an 11th/17th-century Kashmiri poet compares the lovely wine in the glass bottle to Jesus in Mary’s womb (Aṣlaḥ). One finds also instances of allusions to the cross but, as Islam does not accept the Christian version of Christ’s death on the cross, such allusions (e.g., “roses like bleeding heads on the cross”) are usually to the martyr mystic Ḥallāj. As for Rūmī, the four wooden pieces of the cross reminded him of the four elements, from which one can be freed only when reaching the true tawḥīd, the acknowledgment of the One God (Dīvān, no. 693 l. 7215).

It is interesting to note that all the above-mentioned concepts and images have survived into the 14th/20th century, and in some cases Rūmī seems to prefigure some modern attacks on the churches, as when he describes at length the confusion of the Christian sects (Maṯnawī, bk. 1, vv. 335ff.) or asks: “What should Jesus do with the church since he went to the fourth heaven?” (Dīvān I, v. 1283). Such questions occur in the Persian and Urdu verse of Moḥammad Eqbāl, often in even more aggressive language; for him and for many modernists in a colonial age Christianity was associated with the colonial powers, and the poets in Turkey and India wondered why the behavior of modern Christians had so little similarity with the lofty ideals of the Gospels and why they betrayed Christ’s noble spirit for economic and political purposes. Part of the traditional imagery thus became imbued with new, more negative connotations, while maintaining the high spirituality of the founder of Christianity.

CHRISTIANITY viii. Christian Missions in Persia

Christianity was introduced in Persia in the Parthian period, and several bishoprics were established there (Latourette, II, pp. 263ff.). That the Persian church was itself active in proselytizing abroad at the end of the Sasanian period (224-651) and immediately after is clear from remains in India and China, including a trilingual (Pahlavi, Arabic, and Tamil) copper tablet of 824 outlining the rights granted to a Christian church in Quilon (cf. Latourette, II, pp. 283, 334); the cross of Travancore, a copy of the famed cross from the church on Mount St. Thomas near Madras, inscribed in Book Pahlavi (Sanjana; T. K. Joseph); another cross with a Pahlavi inscription in the Syrian church in Kottayam, in the state of Kerala, India; and the Xi-an Fu monument in China, erected in a Christian monastery there in 781 c.e. under the leadership of the Persian Christian Yazd-bōzēd (Saeki, pp. 68-70).

After the Islamic conquest of Persia (completed ca. 31/651) Christians had the status of a protected minority (ḏemmī, q.v.); the main group, concentrated in western Azerbaijan, has been variously known as Nestorian, Assyrian (āšūrī), and Chaldean. In the years between 1012/1604 and 1026/1617 the Safavid Shah ʿAbbās I (996-1038/1588-1629) forcibly transported thousands of Christian Armenians from their homeland and resettled them in different parts of Persia, mainly around Isfahan. The Nestorians and Armenians are still the main groups of indigenous Christians in the country (see armenians of modern iran; assyrians in iran).

For political and economic reasons the Christian states of Europe were eager to form alliances with the Shiʿite rulers of Persia against the Ottoman empire, which was predominantly Sunnite. In the reign of Shah ʿAbbās I, who actively sought political alliance with European powers, several diplomatic missions were sent from Europe to Persia. Their members included Roman Catholic monks from several orders, some of whom were allowed to establish religious centers for European Christians, who were coming to Persia in increasing numbers (Armajani, pp. 145ff.). Shah ʿAbbās allowed the Carmelites to open two schools in Isfahan for teaching European languages and issued an edict ordering all governors (ḥokkām), dārūḡas, and people of his realm to receive and treat the Carmelite missionary Père Jean Thadée with the utmost respect (Falsafī, III, pp. 68-74). Not until the first half of the 13th/19th century, however, did French Roman Catholics and Protestants from the United States and England send actual missions to Persia. A devout French Roman Catholic layman, Eugène Boré, arrived in Tabrīz in 1254/1838 to study Persian language. In Ḏu’l-qaʿda 1254/January 1839 he established a school in Tabrīz, the Université Humanitaire (Dār al-ʿelm-e šenāsāʾī-e melal), which he funded himself, hoping that by teaching them French he could familiarize Persians with European science. Despite harassment from local Armenians and American missions he attracted a good number of students and received royal commendation for his efforts. In 1255/1840 in Tabrīz he joined the French diplomatic delegation on its way to the Persian court (Flandin, I, pp. 166-67; “Dāstān-ī,” pp. 63-66; Maḥbūbī Ardakānī, I, pp. 241-42). In Ṣafar 1256/April 1840, by a farmān (edict) from Moḥammad Shah Qājār (r. 1250-64/1834-48), Roman Catholics were granted permission to open schools in Persia without fear of harassment from Armenians (“Dāstān-ī,” pp. 63-66), and Boré persuaded the French Lazarist brothers to come to Persia (Boré). Within a few years they had opened schools in a number of cities and towns (Figure 1); the most important, the Collège Saint-Louis (Madrasa-ye San Lūʾī ) in Tehran, was opened in 1277/1860-61. The Lazarists were followed by the Sisters of Charity, who founded several girls’ schools, including École Jeanne d’Arc (Madrasa-ye Žāndārk) in Tehran (Piolet; Waterfield, pp. 79-83). The Roman Catholic clergy in Persia served the spiritual needs of Roman Catholic foreigners and of Armenian and Nestorian uniates (Christians who accept the authority of the pope but follow their own rites in their native languages), but they generally limited their work among Persian Muslims to education. By 1343 Š./1964 Catholic missionaries were running seven schools, two kindergartens, and an orphanage in Tehran and seven elementary schools in Tabrīz, Reżāʾīya (Urmia), Ḵorramšahr, and Qazvīn, beside a summer camp at Nowšahr (Komīsīūn-e Mellī, II, pp. 1211-12).

FIGURE 1. Lazarist Catholic Mission School in Tabrīz, 1904. After Nāṭeq, p. 346.View full image in a new tab

By far the most extensive missionary work in Persia was carried on by Protestants, however: Presbyterians from the United States and Anglicans from Great Britain. Their programs were facilitated by translation of the Bible into Persian (see bible vii. persian translations of the bible). The translation of the New Testament that became the basis for all future efforts was prepared by the Englishman Henry Martyn in collaboration with Mīrzā Sayyed ʿAlī Khan of Shiraz; the work was completed in 1227/1812 (Waterfield, p. 179). Subsequently other translations were made, and in 1895 the British and Foreign Bible Society published a revision of all previous texts by the Scottish missionary Robert Bruce; this version is still considered standard (Waterfield, pp. 177-81).

Because hostility from the authorities made it almost impossible to work among Persian Muslims, both Americans and British focused their earliest missionary efforts on native Christians. The first American missionaries, the Reverend and Mrs. Justin Perkins, arrived in Persia in 1250/1834 and the next year established headquarters at Urmia in Azerbaijan, where they founded a church, a school, and a printing house. Their main purpose was to educate Nestorians to carry the Christian message to their Muslim compatriots (Elder, p. 7; Waterfield, p. 103). The school at Urmia was founded in about 1255/1839 and taught smithcraft and carpet weaving in addition to academic courses. In 1255/1839 Perkins procured a royal edict commending him for his efforts in educating young people. By 1304/1887 the mission had established eighty-one schools, with 1,823 pupils (Elder, p. 18; “Dāstān-ī,” pp. 60-61). Soon the American mission had grown to include doctors, educators, and preachers. The Assyrian Evangelical Church of Urmia was organized in 1287-88/1871, and other churches were established in more than fifty neighboring villages (Elder, p. 23). Medical work was an integral part of the Presbyterian mission program. Because of frequent epidemics and an almost total lack of modern medical care in Persia, missionary doctors were in demand especially among the local Kurds. The first American hospital (Westminster Hospital) was opened at Urmia in 1304-5/1882, and the missionaries trained native nurses and assistants, who later were themselves able to provide health care (Elder, p. 21). Internal social and political changes in Persia greatly facilitated expansion of the Presbyterians’ medical mission; in 1285-86/1869 the Mission to Nestorians was renamed the Mission to Persia (Elder, p. 23), and by 1330/1912 Presbyterian hospitals had been established at Tehran (1881), Hamadān (1903), Kermānšāh (1912), Tabrīz (1913), Mašhad (1916), and Rašt (1923), with schools in all but Mašhad, where the small number of students forced the mission to close the school after a few years (Elder, pp. 24ff.; see also bīmārestān).

The evangelical movement that had swept Europe in the mid-18th century had stimulated the founding in England of the Church Missionary Society (C.M.S.) in 1799 and the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1809. As early as 1843 the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge sent an exploratory mission to the Nestorians. This and subsequent visits of the British churchmen helped Mar Shimun, the head of the Nestorian church, realize that the coming of a British religious mission might counterbalance the work of the American Protestants and the French Catholics. In response to further appeals the Church Missionary Society of the Anglican Church sent a small mission under the leadership of Canon A. J. Maclean in 1886. These Anglicans ate, slept, and dressed exactly as did the Nestorian priests, which contrasted sharply with the Western garb and life style of the American missionaries. In 1890 four Anglican nuns arrived to establish schools for women and children. Their work continued until the beginning of World War I, when the British subjects left Urmia (Waterfield, pp. 124ff.).

By the turn of the century there were at least nine Christian missions from the United States and Europe among the Nestorians. According to J. Joseph (p. 123), “There was perhaps no missionary field in the world where there were so many rival "Christian" forces at work, as were found in Urmia at the beginning of this century, all struggling to get prominence among these few people.”

In 1235/1820 Peter Gordon, a former sea captain and free-lance missionary, toured Persia with the purpose of preaching the Gospel. In Russia he had made contact with the Edinburgh Missionary Society, which had a station at Astrakhan and had provided him with tracts and copies of the Bible to distribute in Persia. Somehow he gained the impression that many Persians were inclined to Christianity, and in his “Memorandum Concerning the Propagation of Christianity in Persia” he made recommendations for future missionaries and chose Shiraz as the most suitable center for their work. He was followed four years later by the indefatigable Joseph Wolff, who, in 1824-25, toured Persia on behalf of the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews. During this tour he managed to establish schools for Armenian children in Būšehr and Shiraz. He was back in the Middle East in the years 1827-31 and traveled as far as Central Asia, Afghanistan, and India. He recommended missionary work among the Persian Jews and advocated sending doctors. In 1844 the London Society chose Baghdad as headquarters for missionary activity among the “the Jews in Chaldea and Persia.” Aaron Stern, a member of this mission, made three long, arduous trips to Persia. The mission was closed in 1865, but missionary activity was carried on by local converts. Later in the century the Society established a permanent mission in Isfahan (Wright, pp. 114-18).

In 1285-86/1869 the Church Missionary Society of London sent Reverend Bruce for a two-year sojourn in Isfahan in order to revise Martyn’s Bible translation. His arrival in Persia coincided with the famine and cholera epidemic of 1287-88/1870-71. With funds provided by the Mansion House Persian Relief Fund Bruce and his wife organized relief work, which also included a small orphanage and a trade school. Eventually he was able to persuade the Fund to provide for a permanent mission in Isfahan. Soon others joined the Bruces, and by 1896 there were seventeen missionaries living in Isfahan. Between 1896 and 1900 some of them moved to Shiraz, Yazd, and Kermān, where they built schools and hospitals, as their American colleagues had done in the north. An agreement made with the American Presbyterian Mission in 1895 prevented the British from carrying on missionary activities in northern Persia, which was recognized as an American preserve (Wright, pp. 118-19). Because Persian Muslims were willing to accept medical and educational assistance, these two aspects overshadowed the evangelical aspect of the missionaries’ work. Two of the most important educational institutions were Stuart Memorial College in Isfahan (Anglican) and the more famous Alborz College of Tehran (Presbyterian). Many Persian leaders in different spheres were educated at these two institutions.

The evangelists, educators, and physicians attached to both missions gave selfless assistance to victims of the frequent famines and epidemics that afflicted Persia in the second half of the 13th/19th and the first decades of the 14th/20th centuries. During World War I, when Azerbaijan became a battlefield between Ottoman Turks and Russians, thousands of Nestorians were driven out by the Turks and their Kurdish followers and found refuge in the American mission compound in Urmia. A number of missionaries, both Presbyterian and Anglican, gave their lives.

The conversion of Muslims to Christianity proved very difficult, however, though the missionaries never gave up that goal; nor did they fail entirely in their attempts. The Presbyterians soon recognized that their plan to have Nestorian Christians evangelize their Muslim countrymen was not working. They then turned their own efforts in this direction, and small numbers of Muslims in Azerbaijan, Arāk, Khorasan, Tehran, and Gīlān did join the Presbyterian church. Indeed, the first Persian Christian martyr of modern times was Mīrzā Ebrāhīm of Ḵᵛoy in western Azerbaijan, a convert from Islam. The mullas tried to make him recant, offering him a comfortable place in one of their shrines, but he refused. After his wife left him, taking with her his children and his property, he was arrested and imprisoned in Tabrīz. When he began preaching to other prisoners he was segregated, and he finally died in prison in 1297/1880 (Elder, pp. 47-49). From the beginning the Americans had attempted to unite the Nestorians and Armenians who had become Presbyterian with converts from Islam, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism in a single church, with Persian as the main language.

The Assyrians and Armenians felt more comfortable worshiping in their own languages, however; some of them were even afraid to intermarry. By the late 1340s Š./1960s it was decided to organize three separate congregations according to language, though still within one denomination.

The Anglicans also had to change their approach not long after their arrival. They moved across the river from Jolfā to Isfahan proper and undertook evangelical work among Persian speakers (Waterfield, p. 149). As a result churches in the south were more “Persian” than those in the north: Their hymnal contained more original Persian poetry, their church buildings emulated classical Persian architecture, and their church calendar included celebration of national Persian holidays like Nowrūz.

Although Protestant missionaries were of great service to Persia in the fields of medicine and education and opened many doors to future progress, the Christian message was not widely accepted among Muslims. There was, of course, intermittent opposition from the Shiʿite clergy, though not all were hostile to Christian missionaries. In 1317-18/1900, for example, Ḥājī Mollā ʿAlī, chief theologian of Semnān in Khorasan, allowed the Americans Rev. L. F. Esselstyn and Dr. Samuel Martin Jordan to enter the congregational mosque in that city and even invited the former to ascend the pulpit and preach, which he did (A Century of Mission Work in Iran, pp. 156-60). Two other factors were also significant in limiting the success of Christian efforts to convert the general Persian population. In the first place, Muslims viewed Christians as second-class citizens. To convert therefore meant to accept lower social status. Furthermore, the Christian church bore the stigma of a foreign religion introduced by the most powerful and “imperialist” Western nations of the 13th/19th and 14th/20th centuries respectively (Dehqani-Tafti, pp. 17-19).

Changes in Persia brought about by the Pahlavi shahs affected the church in many ways. On one hand, nationalist policies limited the work of Christian missionaries still further, but, on the other, the Pahlavis were liberal in matters of religion, and Christians were not prevented from preaching or distributing literature. In 1311 Š./1932 all elementary education was taken out of the hands of foreign nationals, and in 1313 Š./1934 American missionaries were ordered out of Azerbaijan (Elder, p. 71). By that time, however, the Persian Presbyterian and Anglican churches had both become independent of the denominational headquarters in the United States and Great Britain, and both obtained permission to establish parochial elementary and secondary schools under Persian supervision (Waterfield, pp. 169ff.). For a time the two churches even entertained the idea of union; although union was never realized, a joint literature committee was formed to prepare a revised hymnal. Other joint activities included publication of books and pamphlets and a Christian magazine, Bible-study classes, and conferences for young people (Elder, pp. 89-97). In 1319 Š./1940 all educational institutions were nationalized, and the government purchased the property of the Presbyterian and Anglican missions (Elder, p. 77).

When the oil industry was nationalized in the early 1330s Š./1950s all British missionaries who happened to be out of the country were refused permission to return to Persia; the Anglican bishop was expelled, and Christian hospitals were given six months to close (Waterfield, p. 173). After the coup d’état engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1332 Š./1953, however, all these restrictions were lifted. Perhaps the most significant event for the future of the Christian church in Persia was the consecration, in 1340 Š./1961, of the Anglican Ḥasan Dehqānī-Taftī as the first Persian bishop in modern times.

After the Revolution of 1357-58 Š./1978-79 Persian Christians became a target of mob hostility and violence. Many left the country, but those who stayed suffered, especially in the south. On 30 Bahman 1357 Š./19 February 1979 the Rev. Arastoo Sayah (Araṣtū Sayyāḥ), pastor of the Anglican church in Shiraz, was murdered in his office. In Mehr-Ābān/October of the same year an unsuccessful attempt was made on the life of Bishop Dehqānī-Taftī, and his wife was wounded. On 16 Ordībehešt 1359 Š./6 May 1980 the bishop’s twenty-four-year-old son Bahrām was murdered in the streets of Tehran. During this period the Anglican hospitals in Shiraz and Isfahan, together with a school for the blind and a farm connected with the latter, were confiscated; the bishop’s office was looted, and both Persian and British church leaders were arrested. Months later they were released; the British left for England, but most of the Persians have not been allowed to leave (Dehqani-Tafti, pp. 92-97).

The bishop is currently in exile in England, and Persian-speaking churches in both northern and southern Persia carry on as best they can. They continue to hold interchurch conferences and to worship under the leadership of Persian-speaking pastors. Persian Christian émigrés in Europe and the United States hold worship services and conferences that are also attended by non-Christian émigrés. In a personal letter the bishop reported that he had persuaded four Episcopal bishops from Australia and Pakistan to visit Persia on 21 Ḵordāḏ 1365 Š./11 June 1986 to consecrate the Rev. Iraj Mottahedeh (Īraj Mottaḥeda) as assistant bishop. Since then Bishop Dehqānī-Taftī has retired and Reverend Mottahedeh has assumed the duties of bishop (consecrated 21 Ḵordāḏ 1365 Š/11 June 1986). According to Iran Times (Washington, 31 August 1990, p. 15), the Persian office of religious minorities had suggested that the Persian Bible Society replace the epithets “Son of God” and “Lord,” in reference to Jesus Christ in its Persian version of the Gospels, with “Prophet”; when the suggestion was refused the office prohibited the printing of the Gospels. According to the same source, the Islamic Republic has now closed down the operations of the Society, confiscated its files, and denied the staff access to its offices.

See also capuchins; carmelites; england, church of, in persia.