The modern state of Iraq corresponds to an area that was
called Mesopotamia in ancient times, a Greek word meaning ‘the land between two
rivers’, the Tigris and the Euphrates.
In its time, Mesopotamia included all of present-day Iraq, along with
small pieces of modern-day Syria, Turkey and Iran. At the time of Christ, a buffer-state called
Osrhoene lay within Mesopotamia occupying an area of north-west Iraq near its
border with Syria (Rassam, 9). This
small state would become very important to the spread and development of
Christianity in the Middle East. An
ancient legend tells the story of the king of Osrhoene, who heard of Jesus
while He was alive and wrote a letter to Him asking Him to come and live in
Osrhoene because he had heard that Jesus was being persecuted by the Jews. In the myth, Jesus replied, telling the king
that He could not come but that He would send him the apostle Addai. Addai arrived in Osrhoene soon after Jesus’
death and healed the king who suffered from an incurable illness. At that point, the king converted to
Christianity and his people followed him.
Church tradition tells that the message of
Jesus was brought to Mesopotamia by the Apostle Thomas, Addai and his students
Aggai and Mari. Thomas and Addai were of
the Twelve Apostles and the students were of the Seventy who traveled with
Jesus. A book entitled “the Acts of
Thomas” was written at the beginning of the third century in the city of Edessa
and describes what he calls the transfer from darkness to light or from sin to
a life with Christ. The transfer begins
with “repentence which is based upon fasting, prayer, keeping vigil,
suppressing physical and personal pleasure and living the life of a stranger
and total detachment from this visible world” (AbouZayd, 387). The Apostle Thomas lived a celibate and
austere life. He ate only once per day, usually
just a piece of bread and salt with some water.
He was one of the first in a long line of monks who built the strong
tradition of Christian asceticism in the region. It is most likely that Christianity reached Osrhoene
and the lands of Mesopotamia largely through Jewish converts who lived in
Mesopotamia and travelled to Palestine for pilgrimage or trade and learned the
Christian message which they carried back to their families and used to build
some of the earliest Christian communities (Rassam, 26).
Osrhoene became the first kingdom to adopt
Christianity as its official religion (Rassam, 11). The population of Osrhoene’s capital, Edessa,
spoke Syriac, a dialect of the Aramaic language. The term Aramaic is derived from Aram, the
fifth son of Shem, the firstborn of Noah.
By the time of Jesus, Aramaic had become a very important language in
the Middle East. The Aramaic language is
a Semitic language closely related to Hebrew.
Aramaic was the language of Semitic peoples throughout the Near
East. It was the language of the
Assyrians, Chaldeans, Hebrews, and Syrians.
A large part of the Hebrew and Arabic languages is borrowed from
Aramaic, including the alphabet. Since
the alphabet was simpler than the cuneiform script, it was used dominantly
among the people who lived in the land of Mesopotamia, whether they were
Persian, Assyrian or Hebrew. The Aramaic
culture and language became dominant in the Middle East and prevailed until the
coming of Islam fifteen hundred years later when Arabic began to replace Aramaic.
It was natural for Christianity to emerge in
the Middle East through communication in the Aramaic language because it was
the language that the apostles, the Jews and Jesus spoke in everyday life. Christian learning had thrived in Osrhoene
and thus, the Syriac dialect of Edessa had come to be used especially among
Christian circles. As the Syriac dialect
became prevalent in Christian circles, the connection between Syriac language
and Christianity became so strong that the word Syriac became tantamount to
Christian (Rassam, 15). In the second
century, Christianity prospered in Mesopotamia among the descendants of two
powerful empires, Chaldea and Assyria (Hanish, 35). When Mesopotamians converted to Christianity,
they rejected their ethnic names and identities because they did not want to
bear any connection to their pagan pasts (Hanish, 2). The name was also significant to Christians
because it distinguished them from the non-Christian Aramaeans. The Church was
called The Church of the East (Hanish,
35).
Syriac became the sacred
religious language of Christians in the Middle East in the same way that Latin
was the sacred language of the Roman Church (Rassam, 16).
Eastern Christianity is still strongly
rooted in its original apostolic tradition because of its thousand-year-old
history, and therefore, modern worship services may closely resemble those of
their first Christian ancestors. The
traditional services are rich with scripture and many works of the Fathers of
the Church, often Biblical paraphrases.
The Christians of Mesopotamia also possessed a fervent passion to spread
the Gospel message into the farthest reaches of the East. They cultivated a strong ascetic and monastic
tradition everywhere they went and also dedicated themselves to the promotion
of culture and learning, to which the monks of medieval monasteries made a
critical contribution (Pacini, 295).
Throughout history, what began simply as The Church of the East has split into
many different churches and many of those first people who wanted to be known,
above all, as Syriacs or Christians, have reverted back to holding tightly to
the name of the original empire from which they descend. In Iraq today, the majority of Christians are
called Chaldeans, Assyrians or Syriacs. The
Chaldeans are the descendants of Christian converts from the ancient empire of
Chaldea while the Assyrians and Syriacs descend from the Assyrian and
Babylonian empires. Strong Chaldean,
Assyrian and Syrian nationalist movements emerged as Christians tried to claim
the right to protect their ethnic origins in response to the Arab nationalist
movements of the 1950s-60s (Pacini, 297). Other ancient churches within Iraq
include the Syrian Catholics, Armenian Orthodox and Armenian Catholic Christians,
who entered the region as refugees fleeing the massacres against Christians in
Turkey in the early 2oth century. There
are also small Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic communities, as well as
Anglicans and Evangelicals (BBC, 3).
These sects are separate and distinct in various ways but the vast
majority of Iraqi Christians share two very strong cultural traits which set
them apart from the rest of the Iraqi population; they believe in the Gospel of
Jesus Christ and they still speak Syriac, the language of the earliest
Christians. At the start of the 7th
century, before the Islamic invasion and conquest of Mesopotamia, about half of
the Mesopotamian population was Christian (Hanish, 2). Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003,
Christians made up around 3-5% of Iraq’s population and that number is believed
to have plummeted since then.
