The Destruction of Early Christianity in the Middle East

Before the rise of Islam, the regions of Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Egypt were heartlands of Christianity. Diverse Christian communities thrived, including the Church of the East (often labeled “Nestorian”) centered in Mesopotamia and Persia, and the Miaphysite churches of Syria and Egypt (pejoratively called “Jacobites” and including the Coptic Church of Egypt). These Eastern churches traced their origins to the earliest apostolic missions and even outpaced Western Christianity in geographic spread. By around 780 AD, the East Syrian patriarch Timothy oversaw a church that stretched across the Middle East into Central Asia and China – by some measures wielding authority over more Christians than the pope in Rome. Crucially, however, Eastern Christianity was internally fragmented by theological disputes. The Council of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451) had branded the Nestorians and the Miaphysites as heretics, excluding them from the imperial Byzantine Church.

The Mystery of Christ and the Imperial Crime of Rome

In the earliest centuries of Christianity, believers wrestled with the deepest mystery of their faith; who Jesus Christ truly was. How could he be fully God and fully human, yet remain one person? The apostles confessed this paradox in awe rather than analysis. John declared that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), and Paul proclaimed that Christ, “being in very nature God, humbled himself and was made in human likeness” (Philippians 2:6-7). The earliest church accepted this tension; the divine and the human united in one Lord; as a mystery to be worshiped, not a doctrine to be legislated.

But as Christianity became the convenient faith of the Roman Empire, mystery gave way to management. The empire wanted order, not paradox. What had been born in the Spirit was drawn into the machinery of law, and theological debate became imperial policy.

The first major rupture came at the Council of Ephesus (431). Called by Emperor Theodosius II in the Eastern Roman Empire, the council was less a gathering of saints than a courtroom of politics. Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, questioned the title Theotokos (“Mother of God”), not to deny Christ’s divinity, but to protect the full truth of his humanity. The Scriptures speak of Jesus as one who hungered (Matthew 4:2), wept (John 11:35), and grew in wisdom (Luke 2:52); all marks of genuine human experience. Nestorius feared that calling Mary Mother of God would confuse the Creator with the creature, turning the mystery of the incarnation into a myth of divine birth.

His opponent, Cyril of Alexandria, feared the opposite danger. He insisted that Mary could rightly be called Theotokos because the child she bore was God made flesh. His concern was not to blur Christ’s humanity, but to preserve the unity of salvation; that the one who died and rose was the same divine Son who was “God manifested in the flesh” (1 Timothy 3:16). Cyril’s theology was deeply biblical, but so was Nestorius’s. Each defended one side of the same revelation: Nestorius the distinction of the natures, Cyril their union.

Yet rather than allow the paradox to remain; divine and human joined in mystery; the emperor demanded uniformity. The council, backed by imperial power, sided with Cyril, condemned Nestorius, and banished him from office. His followers, centered in Syria and Persia, became the Church of the East. What had begun as a spiritual debate was now settled by decree, and disagreement became a crime. The Word who “became flesh” was now forced to fit a legal formula.

Two decades later, the pattern repeated at the Council of Chalcedon (451). This time the pendulum swung the other way. Egyptian and Syrian theologians, anxious to affirm Christ’s unity, spoke of one nature after the incarnation (mia physis). Their intention was not to erase Christ’s humanity but to express the seamless union of God and man in the person of Jesus. They echoed the same Scripture: “The Word became flesh”; not two persons, but one incarnate Lord.

But the Chalcedonian bishops, under another emperor’s eye, feared that such language threatened the balance. They declared that Christ was one person in two complete natures, divine and human, “without confusion, change, division, or separation.” The statement itself was sound theology; but the enforcement was imperial politics. Those who refused it, especially in Egypt, Syria, and Armenia, were branded heretics and driven out. They became known as Miaphysites, wrongly dismissed as “Monophysites,” even though they never denied Christ’s humanity.

Both sides; Nestorians and Miaphysites; were striving to guard the same truth from opposite directions. One feared dividing Christ; the other feared dissolving him. Scripture gives reason for both: “The Father is greater than I” (John 14:28) affirms Christ’s genuine humanity and submission, while “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58) proclaims his eternal divinity. The Bible holds both realities in tension. Rome could not.

Behind the councils lay not revelation but Rome’s obsession with control. The empire, already splintering politically, sought to preserve unity through religious uniformity. The emperor’s theology became the empire’s law. To disagree with the state church was to rebel against the state itself. Thus, what began as an honest search for understanding devolved into persecution, exile, and censorship. Soldiers, not apostles, now guarded the truth.

By the sixth century, the Eastern churches; Nestorian and Miaphysite alike; were hounded by Byzantine rulers who saw them as enemies of order. Entire populations in Egypt and Syria belonged to these “heretical” branches and deeply resented Constantinople’s heavy hand. When the armies of Islam appeared in the seventh century, many local Christians did not resist them; some even welcomed them as liberators from Byzantine oppression.

In trying to unify Christianity by force, Rome fractured it beyond repair. The councils that claimed to define “orthodoxy” were as much about imperial politics as about divine truth. By fusing church and empire, Rome transformed the faith of Christ; born in humility and spiritual freedom; into a religion of bureaucracy and coercion. The mystery of “God made flesh” was no longer a revelation to be contemplated, but a doctrine to be enforced.

The tragedy of the fifth century still echoes. What the apostles proclaimed in wonder, Rome codified in law. The living Christ who walked among fishermen and healed the sick was repackaged as an imperial symbol. If the church had remained grounded in Scripture rather than empire, it might have preserved the paradox instead of policing it; a Christ both divine and human, not confined to definitions or decrees. Instead, Rome’s ambition turned theology into politics, faith into hierarchy, and mystery into dogma; setting Christianity on a path where power mattered more than truth.

The 7th-Century Islamic Conquests: Political Upheaval and Initial Accommodation

In the early 7th century, two great empires – Byzantium and Sassanian Persia – had exhausted each other in decades of war. This opened the door for the armies of Islam to erupt from Arabia. Between 634 and 642, the Arab Muslim forces conquered Syria (decisively at the Battle of Yarmuk in 636), captured Jerusalem (637), and took Egypt (by 642 Alexandria fell), followed by the complete conquest of Persian territory by 651. These events were seismic: Christian political rule was supplanted by Muslim rule in lands that had been Christian for centuries. Yet, importantly, Islamic conquest did not initially mean the immediate destruction of the Christian faith in these regions. Contemporary accounts show that many local Christians actually welcomed the new rulers. The Eastern churches had suffered persecution under Byzantine orthodoxy, so communities like the Jacobites and Nestorians saw the Muslims as more tolerant overlords than the “Romans” had been. The Nestorian Patriarch Ishoʿyahb III, writing in the 650s, praised the Arab rulers: “They do not persecute the Christian religion; on the contrary they favor it, honor our priests and saints…”. Likewise, a Syriac chronicle exulted, “The hearts of Christians rejoiced at the ascendancy of the Arabs…at least they were not Byzantine Greeks”.

Several factors explain this initial accommodation. First, the early Muslim conquerors ruled as a new elite but left existing institutions intact to a large degree. The conquests were rapid, and with the Byzantine-Persian war devastation fresh in memory, the Arabs often spared cities from sack, preferring to collect tribute. There was little immediate pressure to convert. In fact, for the first few centuries, Muslim authorities generally discouraged mass conversion of Christians, since non-Muslims paid special taxes and filled administrative roles. Early caliphs employed many Christian officials (e.g. in the Umayyad capital Damascus) and viewed their new realm in pragmatic terms, sometimes even as a continuation of earlier empires. Moreover, in the beginning the religious boundary was blurred – chronicles spoke of conflicts in ethnic terms (“Arabs” vs. “Syrians”) more than Muslim vs. Christian. To subjugated Christians in Persia, Muslim monotheists were in some ways closer to their worldview than the old Zoroastrian establishment had been. Many Christians also interpreted the stunning Arab victories as divine judgment on the Byzantine imperial church. A Coptic chronicle saw the Arab conquest as God “abandoning the Romans…as punishment for their corrupt faith” – i.e. for persecuting the true (Miaphysite) believers. Michael the Syrian, a 12th-century Jacobite patriarch, even thanked God for delivering his people “from the cruelty of the Romans” by means of the Muslims. In sum, political and religious factors made the Arab Muslim conquest initially less lethal to Middle Eastern Christianity than one might assume. Eastern Christian communities survived the 7th and 8th centuries intact, operating as protected but subordinate communities under Islamic rule. They now became “dhimmis” – non-Muslim subjects allowed to practice their faith in exchange for loyalty and a special tax.

Dhimmi Life and Gradual Decline under the Caliphates (8th–11th Centuries)

For the first few centuries of Islamic rule (approximately 7th–10th centuries), Christians in Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia, and Egypt retained their churches, monasteries, and hierarchy with relatively few disruptions. The new Muslim authorities formalized the dhimma system – a pact that guaranteed protected status to “People of the Book” (Christians and Jews) in exchange for payment of the jizya poll tax and adherence to certain restrictions. While second-class status by definition, the dhimma contract did offer concrete legal protections: Christians could not be killed or forcibly converted as long as they paid taxes and obeyed the laws. In practice, Eastern Christians maintained their own communal courts and education, and continued to build churches and even expand missionary ventures beyond the Muslim empire’s borders. This period saw the Church of the East sending missionaries along the Silk Road – evidence that the faith was still vigorous. Indeed, as late as about 1000 AD, the Church of the East had bishops in 68 cities across Asia (from the Middle East to China). The Christian presence in the Middle East itself also remained substantial: well into the 10th–11th centuries, large portions of the population in Egypt, Syria, and Iraq were still Christian (even if no longer a majority in the cities). Egypt, for example, probably did not attain a Muslim majority until the Ninth or 10th century, and Syria-Mesopotamia until the 11th.

Cultural and administrative changes, however, steadily eroded the position of the churches. Arabic gradually replaced Syriac, Greek, and Coptic as the language of administration and higher culture, which over generations made it harder for Christian communities to sustain their distinct identity. Social mobility and full civic rights were open only to converts to Islam – a strong incentive for educated elites to convert (at least nominally) to join the ruling class. And although outright persecution was not routine policy, periodic episodes of repression or violence did occur. As Muslim identity hardened over time, the early ethos of tolerance gave way to stricter attitudes. Starting in the late 7th century, the caliphal government began codifying discriminatory regulations: for example, in the 690s the Umayyads imposed the jizya tax on all non-Muslims in Syria (an event which a chronicler laments as the moment “all the calamities began” for the Christian people).

Pagan Rome Under a Christian Veil

What’s striking in all this is how differently the Eastern and Islamic worlds understood the worship of God compared to the Roman Church that emerged in the West. When the Caliph Yazid II issued his edict in 722 CE, banning the public display of crosses and icons; and even, according to some accounts, ordering the destruction of Christian images in churches ; it horrified many in the Byzantine world. Yet to others, especially those who still read Scripture literally, the decree may have seemed strangely closer to the biblical commandment itself:

“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath…” (Exodus 20:4).

For the earliest followers of Christ; Jews and Aramaic-speaking Christians of Syria and Palestine; the commandment against making images was not symbolic; it was central. They worshiped the invisible God, revealed perfectly in Christ, not through statues, icons, or relics, but through spirit and truth (John 4:24). The early church, before it became Roman, held this conviction deeply.

But as Christianity was absorbed into the Roman imperial system, that purity of worship was gradually replaced by visual religion; the veneration of images, saints, and relics. What had begun as remembrance became representation, and representation became adoration. The saints of Rome, with their carved figures, halos, and feast days, often mirrored the old pagan deities and their festivals. The transition from Jupiter to St. Peter, from Diana to Mary, from the household gods (lares) to the saints’ icons, was less a conversion than a rebranding of the old religion under a Christian name.

To my mind, this makes the reaction of Yazid II all the more revealing. Even though his motives were political, his command to destroy images actually echoes a truth the Bible had already spoken; that worship should be directed to the Creator, not to created forms. The later Roman version of Christianity, with its painted icons, statues, and relics, reflects less the spirit of Christ and more the cultural habits of imperial Rome; a religion of spectacle, ceremony, and visible power.

In that sense, the iconoclast impulse; whether from the Coptic, Syriac, or even early Islamic world; seems more faithful to the ancient commandment than the ornate image-worship that became central to Latin Christendom. The irony is painful: those who tried to honor God’s command not to make images were branded heretics or infidels, while the empire that baptized its pagan gods under Christian names became the face of “orthodoxy.”

In Egypt around the same time (8th century), we see one of the first organized persecutions: authorities targeted the influential Coptic monasteries – forbidding new monks, branding and mutilating those who refused to comply, and temporarily closing many monasteries. This harsh campaign of 717–720 AD saw monks branded on the hand and fugitive monks punished by amputation. Such measures, however, were short-lived; later caliphs reversed the policies and even praised one tolerant ruler as “the deliverer of the orthodox [Christians]”. Indeed, for most of the 8th and 9th centuries, episodes of anti-Christian violence were sporadic and local, often contrary to the wishes of more pragmatic caliphs. Some incidents were essentially lawlessness rather than directed persecution – for instance, raids by bandits on remote monasteries (like the devastating sack of the Wadi al-Natrun monasteries in Egypt in 818) occurred because monasteries were wealthy, undefended targets in unsettled times. In other cases, urban riots broke out (e.g. against churches in Palestine and Syria in the 10th century), but Muslim rulers often intervened to repair or compensate for damaged churches. On the whole, from the 7th to 10th century the Eastern Christian churches adapted and endured. They paid taxes and bowed to humiliating rules (like wearing distinctive clothing or riding only mules/donkeys), but they were not usually subject to mass violence. Notably, the early Islamic period produced few martyrs – unlike in later eras, we hear of almost no Christians being executed for their faith in these centuries (except a handful who provoked authorities by publicly insulting Islam). This relative calm allowed many Christian communities to survive up to the High Middle Ages – albeit slowly shrinking in proportion as conversion to Islam (whether sincere or for social advantage) took its toll.

A turning point came in the late 10th to early 11th century. The Fatimid Caliph al-Ḥakim bi-Amr Allah in Egypt launched one of the first sustained persecutions from 1004–1013 AD. Hakim, known for his erratic and extreme behavior, ordered thousands of churches across Egypt and Syria to be destroyed or converted into mosques – reportedly 3,000 churches in total were targeted. In 1009 he even demolished the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, a shocking act throughout Christendom. He forced Christians to wear conspicuous heavy crosses and Jews to wear identifying marks (a practice later generations of caliphs would also adopt). Although al-Hakim’s persecution eventually eased (and he was assassinated in 1021, later reputed to have claimed divinity), it demonstrated that unpredictable fanaticism at the top could suddenly worsen Christians’ plight. Fortunately Hakim’s burst of oppression was an outlier attributable to his personal instability rather than mainstream Islamic policy. However, by the 11th century the accumulated effects of dhimmi restrictions and occasional violence meant that Christianity was losing ground. Demographically, the Christian share of the population had been steadily falling. Egypt, which remained majority Christian for roughly 600 years after the Arab conquest, saw Muslims become a majority by the 12th–13th century through attrition. Coptic Christians “lost their majority status after the 14th century, as a result of successive persecutions and the destruction of churches in Egypt” . In the fertile crescent (Syria/Iraq), a Muslim majority likely emerged a bit earlier, by the 11th century. Still, on the eve of the Crusades (c. 1090 AD), large indigenous Christian populations and venerable churches were still present throughout the Middle East. The stage was set for a far more traumatic series of shocks in the centuries to come.

The Crusades and Shifting Fortunes (11th–12th Centuries)

The arrival of the Crusades (late 11th–13th centuries) added a new volatile element to the mix of political and religious pressures. Western European Crusaders entered the Middle East from 1097 onward, at first helping the Byzantine Empire push back Seljuk Turkish advances (notably at Nicaea and Antioch), and then establishing their own Crusader states (the Kingdom of Jerusalem and others). For the indigenous Eastern Christians, the Crusades were a double-edged sword. On one hand, the Crusaders were fellow Christians who temporarily brought certain cities (like Antioch, Jerusalem, Tripoli) under Christian rule again. Eastern Christians sometimes welcomed the Crusaders as liberators from Muslim domination – for example, some Syriac Christians in Jerusalem reportedly opened the gates to the First Crusade’s army in 1099. On the other hand, Latin-Byzantine sectarian tensions meant the Crusaders often mistrusted the Eastern Orthodox or Oriental Orthodox Christians. The Crusaders introduced Latin bishops in place of local clergy in major sees, alienating Eastern Christians. Furthermore, the brutality of the Crusaders’ conquests (such as the sack of Jerusalem in 1099, when perhaps 40,000 were massacred) horrified Muslims and Christians alike. The Crusades as such did not aim to destroy Eastern Christianity – but their presence greatly affected the geopolitical climate that Eastern Christians lived in.

More consequential was the rise of new Muslim powers like the Seljuk Turks and later the Ayyubid and Mamluk dynasties, who fought both Crusaders and perceived internal traitors.

The Final Destruction of Eastern Christianity (11th–15th Centuries)

From the 11th century onward, the ancient heartlands of Christianity; Anatolia, Syria, and Mesopotamia; were devastated by a relentless sequence of wars and invasions. The Seljuk Turks, arriving from Central Asia, shattered Byzantine control in Asia Minor after the Battle of Manzikert (1071). Cities like Edessa and Melitene, once centers of Syriac Christianity, were sacked; churches burned, bishops killed, and entire provinces depopulated. By the 13th century, even before the final fall of Byzantium, much of the old Christian East lay in ruins.

The Crusades brought no salvation. Latin armies clashed with Muslims but also alienated the Eastern churches, while Muslim rulers came to view local Christians as potential collaborators. When the Mamluks seized power in Egypt and Syria (1250), they unleashed brutal persecutions. The Sultan Baybars (1260–1277) razed Antioch in 1268, slaughtering its inhabitants and boasting of priests “slain on the altars.” Later Mamluk rulers enforced humiliating restrictions, closed churches, and sanctioned mob violence; most infamously in 1321, when Coptic churches across Egypt were burned and looted. By 1400, Egypt’s Christians had fallen from a majority to barely 10% of the population.

Meanwhile, the Mongol invasions (13th–14th centuries) brought momentary hope, then disaster. Early Mongol rulers, many linked to the Nestorian Church of the East, were religiously tolerant. Christians briefly flourished under the Ilkhans, rebuilding churches and gaining positions at court. The Nestorian monk Rabban Bar Sauma even traveled to Europe as a Mongol envoy, dreaming of a Christian-Mongol alliance. But after 1295, when Ghazan Khan converted to Islam, tolerance ended. Mongol successors turned fiercely Muslim, and Christians were massacred from Central Asia to Persia. By the mid-14th century, nearly all the once-thriving Christian centers of Asia; from Samarkand to Beijing; had disappeared.

The final catastrophe came with Timur (Tamerlane) around 1400. A self-declared Muslim conqueror, Timur annihilated what remained of Eastern Christendom. His campaigns across Syria, Mesopotamia, and Armenia wiped out surviving monasteries and dioceses. Towns like Aleppo, Mosul, and Ani were left desolate, their Christian populations slaughtered. By the time he was done, the once-global Church of the East and the Jacobite and Coptic communities were reduced to scattered remnants.

By 1453, when Constantinople fell to the Ottomans, the spiritual and demographic transformation of the Middle East was already complete. Christianity, once the majority faith of the region, survived only in isolated pockets; mountain monasteries, desert villages, and minority enclaves. The later Ottoman millet system preserved these remnants but confirmed their permanent subordination.

A millennium earlier, the Middle East had been the cradle of Christianity; by 1500, it had become its graveyard. As Philip Jenkins writes, “the elimination was so thorough that even the memory of what was lost disappeared.” The faith that had once stretched from Syria to China now survived only as minorities under Islamic rule; the living remnants of a civilization Rome’s imperial ambition had long ago divided and doomed.

Western Europe in Contrast: Why Christianity Survived There

From the Way of Christ to the Religion of Empire

If we compare Western Christendom with the earliest followers of Jesus, the transformation is almost unrecognizable. The apostles and their first disciples were Jews, steeped in the Scriptures, keeping the Sabbath, celebrating the Passover, and worshipping the one invisible God without images or intermediaries. Their faith was not a system of temples and titles, but a way of life; humble, communal, and rooted in the words of Christ: “The hour is coming, and now is, when true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth.” (John 4:23).

But as the faith moved westward into the Greco-Roman world, it began to change. Rome could not easily accept a religion born from the Jewish prophets and preached by a crucified Galilean. So it reinterpreted Christianity through imperial culture, transforming the faith of peace into a religion of ceremony, hierarchy, and control.

The Holy Day (Sabbath) was shifted from Saturday to Sunday, aligning worship with the pagan “day of the sun” (dies solis), already celebrated across the Roman Empire. This change was later justified by the claim that Christ rose on Sunday; yet Scripture itself tells a different story.

In Matthew 28:1, it is written: “In the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to see the sepulcher.” To understand this correctly, we must remember that Jewish days begin and end at sunset, not at midnight as in our modern reckoning. Therefore, when Matthew says “in the end of the Sabbath,” he is describing Saturday evening, the close of the seventh day and the beginning of the first day of the week.

By that time, the tomb was already empty. The resurrection had already taken place before the first day had fully begun. There was no sunrise resurrection on Sunday morning; only the discovery that Christ had already risen “as it began to dawn” (that is, at the Sabbath’s end).

The belief that Sunday should replace the Sabbath because “Christ rose on Sunday” is therefore a fabrication of later centuries, not a teaching of the apostles. The early followers of Jesus; all of them Jews; continued to honor the seventh-day Sabbath as commanded by God, not as a burden but as a covenantal sign: “Wherefore the children of Israel shall keep the Sabbath... for a perpetual covenant” (Exodus 31:16–17).

The shift to Sunday worship did not come from Christ or His disciples but from imperial Rome, eager to align Christianity with the pagan day of solar veneration, the dies solis; the day of the Sun. This was the day on which pagans across the empire honored deities like Sol Invictus and Mithras, both symbols of divine light and cosmic order. By transferring the holy Sabbath to the “day of the sun,” Rome baptized pagan custom under a Christian name, merging idolatry with faith and separating believers from the Hebrew roots of the gospel.

See also my breakdown of events in detail https://www.rebuildspirit.com/post/after-three-days-before-corruption-reclaiming-the-biblical-resurrection-timeline

The Passover, which commemorated Israel’s deliverance, was replaced by Easter, named after a spring fertility goddess in northern Europe. What had been a remembrance of the Lamb of God became an adaptation of the old seasonal festivals that honored nature and rebirth.

Even more striking was the return of idols. The second commandment; “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” (Exodus 20:4); had been central to Jewish and early Christian faith. The apostles never built statues of Christ or Mary; they prayed to the unseen God. Yet as Rome absorbed Christianity, it reintroduced images, relics, and icons, parading them through the streets just as the pagans had once carried their gods. The martyrs became saints, the saints became intercessors, and the images of saints filled the temples once dedicated to Jupiter (Zeus) and Venus. The worship of the one God was now mingled with the veneration of countless figures; a “holy pantheon” under a new name.

Alongside these changes came a profound shift in authority. The early church had been a fellowship of equals; apostles, elders, and believers guided by the Spirit. There was no single ruler, no emperor-priest. But as the Roman Empire adopted Christianity, a new hierarchy emerged. Bishops later claimed “apostolic succession” as a means of asserting authority and suppressing "heresy", but in the early church this idea had no basis in hereditary office or institutional power. The apostles never passed down thrones or titles; they passed down teaching and witness, not rule. What began as a call to preserve the message of Christ was later distorted into a claim of exclusive authority, used to control belief rather than to guard truth. Rome then extended this claim further, declaring that the bishop of Rome alone; the so-called pope; was the supreme successor of Peter, and therefore the head of the universal church. This claim, absent from Scripture and unknown to the apostles, became the cornerstone of Roman authority.

See also my earlier post on why it was Paul, not Peter, who truly established the church in Rome 

https://www.rebuildspirit.com/post/chains-not-thrones-why-paul-not-peter-brought-the-gospel-to-rome

By the time the medieval papacy reached its height, Christianity in the West had become the mirror image of what Jesus opposed. The kingdom of God, which Christ said “is not of this world,” became the kingdom of the world itself. The cross, once a symbol of sacrifice and humility, was now a banner of conquest paraded. Armies marched in Christ’s name, while the poor and the dissenters were silenced in His name. The early faith that preached forgiveness and meekness was replaced by a religion that punished heresy, blessed wars, and crowned kings.

In forgetting that Jesus and His apostles were Jewish, Western Christianity severed itself from its original spiritual DNA. It lost the rhythm of the Hebrew Scriptures, the humility of the prophets, and the communal simplicity of the early believers. The festivals, the commandments, and even the day of rest were changed to suit imperial convenience and pagan continuity. What survived was not the faith of the upper room in Jerusalem but the faith of the throne room in Rome.

Rome had conquered the faith it claimed to serve. It had exchanged truth for power, worship for ritual, and the Word for the sword. And while it built cathedrals and empires, it forgot the man who once walked the hills of Galilee, saying simply: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.”

How Rome’s Faith Undid the East

The tragedy of this transformation is that it did not stop at Rome’s borders. The empire’s version of Christianity; institutionalized, politicized, and cut off from its Jewish origins; gradually spread eastward through force and decree, crushing the very communities that had first carried the gospel into the world. What had begun as a faith of the oppressed became the faith of the oppressor.

The Eastern churches; in Syria, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Armenia, and Persia; had long spoken the language of Christ Himself, worshipping in Syriac and Aramaic, not in the Latin of Rome or the Greek of imperial councils. They traced their lineage directly to the apostles; Thomas, Thaddeus, and Mark; and their theology reflected the Semitic worldview of Scripture rather than the philosophical abstractions of Greece. These believers saw Christ not through metaphysics but through relationship: as the living Word who healed, forgave, and united heaven and earth.

How bitterly ironic it is that the very institution which divided, persecuted, and silenced the Eastern churches for the sake of empire now stands as the loudest voice calling for “unity” among all faiths. The same Roman Church that once branded its own brothers and sisters as heretics, that enforced belief through councils convened by emperors and not prophets, now stretches out its hand for interfaith harmony; after centuries of conquest, coercion, and corruption.

It was Rome that crushed the churches of Syria and Egypt in the name of “orthodoxy,” Rome that exalted emperors and popes above the Word of God, and Rome that replaced the living Christ with images, relics, and intermediaries. It was Rome that rewrote the commandments, shifting the Sabbath, erasing the warning against graven images, and baptizing pagan festivals under Christian names. And it was Rome that invented a false succession of authority, claiming divine right for men who sat upon thrones of gold while Christ Himself had no place to lay His head.

Now, after so many centuries of blood spilled in Christ’s name, after the true faith was buried under the weight of empire and idolatry, Rome dares to speak of unity. The Church that once demanded obedience to its decrees now asks the world to join it under one banner, claiming to hold the same truth it long ago betrayed.

I say no. True Christianity cannot be built on lies, nor can it be reconciled with the powers that murdered its spirit. The faith of Christ and His apostles was never about thrones, crowns, or worldly dominion. It was about the Word of God, the gospel of love and repentance, the freedom of conscience,the indwelling Holy Spirit and the worship of the Father “in spirit and in truth.” (John 4:24)

Christianity has seen enough of power-hungry men twisting the faith to their own ends. Enough of kingdoms built on the blood of the saints. The church that Christ founded was never meant to rule empires, but to serve the world in humility and truth. And until the followers of Yeshua return to that gospel; the one He lived and died to bring; no false unity, no papal claim, no ecumenical council can restore what Rome destroyed.