The Church of the East

by Christoph Baumer

This is a wonderful book, and it brings me back to where I started – the Christianities we’ve completely forgotten. These are the Christianities that began by speaking the language of Jesus Christ – he didn’t speak Hebrew, he spoke Aramaic as his first language. They were the churches of Syria, the coast of the Eastern Mediterranean, and they spread, not westwards into the Mediterranean, but eastward into what is now Iraq, Iran, then to Central Asia and finally to China, possibly Korea and certainly Japan.