The Church of the East in Central Asia and China
Description:... A collection of papers on the history of Christianity along the Silk Road and in pre-modern China, pushing back the frontier of knowledge in a fast developing new area of research. The diffusion of Christianity along the Silk Road from Iraq and Iran to China in the pre-modern era has attracted scholarly attention in the West since the discovery of the famous Xian (Nestorian) Monument c. 1623. This initial discovery was dismissed as a Jesuit forgery by Voltaire, Edward Gibbon and many other scholars of the Enlightenment. However, its authenticity has been more than vindicated by the discovery of genuine (Nestorian / Jingjiao) Christian texts in Chinese from Dunhuang and in Syriac, Sogdian and Old Turkish from Turfan (Bulayïq) at the beginning of the last century. The discovery of a second major inscription which included part of a Chinese Christian (Jingjiao) text already known to scholars from Dunhuang, and the recent re-discovery of several Dunhuang Christian texts in a Japanese library, has removed any lingering doubts about the authenticity of the texts recovered from Dunhuang. The surviving material spans almost a millennium from the introduction of Christianity along the Silk Road in the sixth and seventh centuries through the Mongol period and beyond.
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