When I was a small boy, my parents used to drive me
round historic churches, searching out whatever looked interesting or odd.
But soon they realised that they had created a monster.
The history of the Christian Church became my life's work.
For me, no other subject can rival its scale and drama.
For two thousand years,
Christianity has been one of the great players in world history,
..inspiring faith,
but also squalid politics.
It is an epic story starring a cast of extraordinary people,
from Jesus himself and the first apostles
to empresses, kings and popes.
CROWD CHEERS
From reformers and champions of human conscience
to crusaders and sadists.
Religious belief can transform us for good or ill.
It has brought human beings to acts of criminal folly
as well as the highest achievements of goodness and creativity.
I will tell the story of both extremes.
Christianity has survived persecution,
splits,
wars of religion,
mockery, hatred.
Today there are two billion Christians - a third of humanity.
Protestant,
Catholic, Orthodox, Pentecostal and many more.
Deep down the Christian faith boasts a shared core, but what is it?
In modern Europe, Christianity seems threatened
by the apathy of a secular society.
Will it survive?
Can it?
I'm chasing the story of Christianity across the globe,
coming face to face with people who have got their own take
on this 2,000-year-old adventure.
And where better to start than in the city which first knew Jesus the Christ?
Jerusalem.
RADIO PLAYS POP MUSIC
I'm in Jerusalem for a very good reason,
but it's probably not what you think.
We've all heard something of the Christian story.
Jesus, the wandering Jewish teacher, crucified by the Romans.
Paul, who had hunted down Christians until on the road to Damascus,
he experienced a blinding vision of Jesus Christ resurrected from the dead.
Paul's new-found zeal focused on people beyond the Jews - Gentiles.
It took him far from Jerusalem, to Rome, and it reshaped not just
the faith of Christ but in the end, all estern civilisation.
That's the familiar story of the origins of Christianity.
But I'm here in Jerusalem because I want to look for something else.
You can find clues here in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
The Church is said to have been built where Jesus was crucified and buried.
At its heart is what's believed to be his tomb.
Somehow the followers of Jesus became convinced that he rose from here to new life.
The belief that Jesus can overcome death is
the most difficult and troubling affirmation of the Christian faith.
Over 20 centuries it's made Christians act in heroic,
joyful, beautiful, terrible ways.
It's made this one of the holiest sites on earth.
You see, at heart Christianity is a personality cult.
Its core is the unprecedented idea that God became human,
not in a pharaoh, a king or even an emperor,
but in a humble peasant from Galilee.
And the conviction that you can meet Jesus, the son of God,
and transform your life is a compelling message.
It's what drove Christianity's relentless expansion.
But the Church built around the tomb of Jesus is also the starting point for a forgotten story,
a story that may overturn your preconceptions about early Christianity.
Pride of place in this building goes to two churches.
This chapel belongs to the Greek Orthodox Church.
Orthodoxy is a large part of the Christian story.
The other church with a strong presence here is actually
the biggest in the modern world -
Catholicism.
HE INTONES
Orthodoxy and Catholicism dominated Christianity in Europe,
in the West, for its first 15,000 years.
But as you walk around the edges of the Church you can't fail to notice other curious little chapels.
They're not Western or European,
they're Middle Eastern or African.
And they tell a very different story about the origins of Christianity.
Around the back of Christ's tomb is Egypt's Coptic Church.
There are plenty of other Churches represented here, but you need to know where to look.
Now this is the chapel of the Syriac Orthodox Church,
which the Greek Orthodox of course would call unorthodox.
Back outside and through a side door leading up to the roof, you'll find the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
Many versions of Christian history would make this unorthodox too
and yet it's far older than better-known versions of Christianity, like Protestantism.
It's easy for tourists to dismiss these ancient churches as quaint,
irrelevant even, but that would be a big mistake.
These chapels contain vital clues to the story I want to tell.
Because the origins of the Christian faith are not in the West,
but here in these ancient Churches of the East.
For centuries Christianity flourished in the East.
And indeed at one point it was poised to triumph in Asia, maybe even in China.
The headquarters of Christianity might well have been Baghdad rather than Rome.
And if that had happened Western Christianity would have been very different.
I will trace that huge voyage...
..from Jerusalem to Syria,
through Central Asia,
to the far reaches of the Asian continent.
In my journey, I'll discover how the Christian faith survived worlds away from Jerusalem.
I'm not giving you a history of Christian theology, though I won't
be afraid to plunge you into many ancient arguments about Christian faith.
The main character here is not Jesus or the gospels.
It is in fact the Church,
the institution of Christian faith that has fought its way through history.
It all started here in Jerusalem, when the first followers of Jesus formed a Jewish Christian Church.
It was led by James, whom the gospels call the brother of Jesus.
Here in the Old City is the Armenian Cathedral of St James.
His tomb is said to lie below the high altar.
The Jerusalem church probably would have remained the headquarters of a single unified Christianity.
But in the year 70, disaster struck.
A rebellion of Jews against the Romans ended in a siege of Jerusalem.
As troops finally broke into the city, the Temple went up in flames.
Today its Western Wall is all that remains.
Christians quit the city before the siege.
Now the fledgling faith would have to survive outside its Jewish homeland.
But could it adapt?
That's the big test facing any world religion.
With Jerusalem gone where would Gentile Christians look now?
Well, you might think obviously west to Rome, because that's where Paul had gone.
But at the time it would not have seemed obvious at all.
Paul had been killed in Rome. So had the Apostle Peter.
What if you take the other road out of Jerusalem - east?
Today this is Urfa in south-east Turkey.
In the first century it was called Edessa,
capital of a small kingdom,
and wealthy because it controlled part of the main trade route east.
Edessa is special, because its ruler King Abgar set an important precedent here.
He chose to show his personal devotion to Jesus by adopting Christianity as the Kingdom's
official state religion, at least 100 years before the Romans did.
For the last 17 centuries, Christianity has been repeatedly linked with the state,
so in the United Kingdom, the monarch is still Supreme Governor of the Church of England.
And this is where it all started - in the ancient Eastern Christian kingdom of Edessa.
And Edessa pioneered something else that has become inseparable from Christianity...
HE SINGS
Church music.
Christian Edessa has long since disappeared.
After the First World War it became a community in exile, over the border in neighbouring Syria.
This is the only surviving descendent of that ancient Church.
CONGREGATION SINGS
But its liturgical chant is still based on the distinctive tradition of Edessa.
These hymns are derived from the poetry of the great 4th century Syrian theologian St Ephrem.
And he was building on an even earlier tradition from these lands,
echoing the music of the Roman Empire.
I found that service very touching because what we were hearing was
the ghost of the music of the streets and market places,
seized by the Church, turned into psalms and hymns, taken
across the western Mediterranean,
turned into the music of the whole Church -
Latin Gregorian Chant, Johann Sebastian Bach,
even the tambourines and guitars of the Pentecostals. All come from here.
But at the start of the 4th century, hymn singing
would have been the last thing on the minds of Christians in the western half of the Roman Empire.
HORN BLARES
In the West, most Christians wouldn't be singing the public
praises of God because it was too dangerous.
Successive Roman Emperors from Nero onwards persecuted Christianity.
They hated it. I expect most Romans would've agreed with them.
In the early 4th Century, a betting man might have put
his money on Christianity becoming a major religion here in the East,
but then something completely unexpected happened in the West.
A new Roman Emperor, Constantine, made Christianity his own.
Out went the old gods and goddesses of pagan Rome.
In came the one God of the Christians.
It was a turning point in the history of the Christian faith.
It was more than a 100 years after the King of Edessa had made Christianity his official religion.
But to be the state religion of a whole Empire was something else altogether.
The ability to reinvent itself would become a hallmark of Christianity.
But this was the greatest reinvention of them all.
It meant an end to persecution. It brought power and wealth.
It gave the Christian faith the chance of becoming a universal religion.
From this moment, a Church of the Roman Empire emerged.
In theory, it embraced Christians in the Eastern Empire as well as the West.
But in the East, many Christians were unimpressed by the new alliance, even hostile.
At stake were fundamental disagreements about the direction the faith should take.
Jesus had told people to abandon wealth, not to ally with the rich and powerful.
Remember his joke about a rich man wanting to enter the kingdom
of Heaven was like a camel trying to get through the eye of a needle?
Some Christians actually listened to what Jesus had said.
It was Eastern Christians here in Syria who led the way...
..showing Western Christianity a pattern for spiritual life.
We call this pattern monasticism.
A way of life involving isolation from the world,
austerity,
and suffering.
In the north of Syria there is one of the oddest souvenirs of the new
religious movement in Eastern Christianity.
For almost 40 years a holy man called St Simeon
lived on top of a stone column.
He's now known as a pillar saint or Stylite.
I am actually really excited to be here, because I first saw a picture
of this when I was eight and I never thought I'd come here and now I am. I'm here.
And there it is, the stump of his pillar.
Among all the other pillars you can see.
it's the thing which looks shapeless.
You've gotta imagine this stump 30ft high or whatever it was.
Very strange sight indeed.
It's still pretty strange.
Crowds came to see St Simeon sitting on his pillar.
The church was built around it after his death.
And it's pilgrims who made the pillar look so strange.
In their search for healing souvenirs, they whittled it down
until it looks like a well-sucked holy lollipop.
St Simeon is the most famous of many Syrian hermits
who tried to come closer to God by punishing their bodies.
For them, suffering was the road to salvation and they tried to inspire others to follow.
According to the Syrian enthusiast for St Simeon's Church I met,
this approach set Eastern Christians apart from the West.
St Simeon here,
he was on the crossing of two main roads
between Aleppo and Antioch, between Apamea
and Syrius, so that was a crossing where many people used to pass with their caravan or whatever.
That's interesting because the stereotype in Europe of the hermit
is someone who goes away from the world,
yet this man is right in the middle of things.
Yeah, therefore as you said, when you see the man
as a Stylite - vertical connection - he is between the land and God.
He is like a lighthouse. Exactly. Here is a man,
who's suffered more than most people in his life. What is it that makes him want to suffer?
Christians at the beginning of Christianity here,
they were thinking, "We are passing by in this life.
"We should suffer. This is a valley of the tears.
"Our day will be in the next life where we will see God.
"We will be in Heaven, in paradise.
"We should suffer here to deserve the other one."
A clear divide was growing between East and West.
Even as the Roman Emperor was making Christianity powerful and wealthy,
here on its Eastern borders, many preferred a faith which denied the temptations of the world.
Some started to gather in communities where they could follow God in purity and simplicity.
They created the very first monasteries.
The new institution of monastic life eventually
reshaped Christianity when the Western Roman Empire fell apart.
Monks turned their holiness into power,
and power is always a problem for the Church.
People want it, and they'll fight to get it.
And their fight gets mixed up with what they believe about God.
Constantine may well have thought that Christianity would reunite his vast empire.
In fact the opposite happened. It deepened existing divisions.
Constantine presided over four rival centres of Christian authority.
Antioch, in modern day Turkey, was the main focus in the East.
Further south was Alexandria in Egypt.
The Bishop of Rome was the Pope,
honoured in the West as successor to the Apostle Peter.
And trying to mediate between these rival centres
was Constantine's new capital,
Constantinople, present day Istanbul.
From the beginning, Christians had argued over passionately held beliefs.
But from here in his new capital, the Emperor watched in horror
as the unity of the faith was tested to its limits.
Matters came to a head over a question at the heart of the Christian faith.
Who exactly was Jesus and what was his relationship to God?
Christians believe that God is all-powerful, the creator of the universe,
and Jesus is the son of God,
but he's also a flesh and blood man who died on the cross.
Now a man who died on a cross surely can't be the same as the creator of the universe.
How then are they both the One God?
According to a thoughtful but maverick Egyptian priest, Jesus was not the same as God.
The priest's name was Arius. He claimed that it was impossible for God,
who is perfect and indivisible,
to have created the human being Jesus out of himself.
But hang on. If Jesus Christ is not fully God, then is his death
on the cross enough to save you from your sins and get you to Heaven?
If you care about the afterlife and they did, that's the biggest question you can ask.
The power of Christian belief lay in its claim to wipe away all
the misery that humans feel about sin and death, our guilt and shame.
Christ died to give us the chance to have an infinitely better life.
Arius' view could be seen to undermine all this.
And so he was condemned.
Yet the fact was many Christians had said the same over the previous
three centuries, here on the shores of the Bosphorus as much as anywhere else.
But Constantine couldn't allow this divisive idea to split the Church and in the process, his Empire.
He had to put a stop to it.
Just a few hours out of Istanbul is one of the most important sites
in Christianity's turbulent history.
Bishops from across the Empire were summoned to solve the crisis
in an Imperial Palace now thought to be submerged beneath this lake.
Today the town here is called Iznik.
Back in the 4th century it was the city of Nicaea, the setting for the famous Council of Nicaea.
There had been church councils before, but this was the first held in the presence of an Emperor.
And it was Constantine, who proposed the vital statement which he hoped would send everyone home satisfied.
The phrase was that Jesus was "of one substance" with the Father.
In Greek, that's homoousios.
# I believe in one God... #
After many more arguments over the next half century,
this phrase stayed at the heart
of one of the most important Christian texts of all time.
# ..in one Lord Jesus Christ... #
We call it the Nicene Creed, and it's still recited
in everyday worship throughout the Christian world.
# ..being of one substance with the Father... #
It states that God is equally the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit.
They are three in one,
the Trinity.
# Amen. #
The Emperor must have breathed a sigh of relief.
Emperors longed for unity.
Inconveniently for them, Christians repeatedly valued truth rather more.
A hundred years later, in 428, a clever but tactless scholar
was appointed the new Bishop of Constantinople,
Nestorius.
Bishop Nestorius wasted little time in plunging the Church
into a fresh quarrel about the nature of Jesus.
It would end the unity of the Church once and for all and in the process
consolidate eastern Christianity as a distinct and formidable force.
Now I'll try to get to the heart of what might seem a very technical argument.
After Nicaea, we know that Jesus Christ is of one substance with the Father, so he's divine.
But he's also a man. So he's human.
He has two natures but he's one person.
How does that actually work?
Nestorius understood the two natures in Christ
as being something like oil and water contained in a glass.
Although they are in the same container, they remain quite separate.
So in Christ there are two separate natures - human and divine.
It seemed a neat and satisfying formula,
especially for Christians seeking salvation.
If Jesus was fully human, people could identify with him
and if he was fully divine, he could grant the gift of eternal life.
But many thought it too neat.
The Bishop of Alexandria in Egypt, called Cyril, was appalled.
Separating out the two natures of Jesus tore Christ in two.
Imagine a glass containing water and wine. They mix indivisibly.
So, Cyril argued, it is with Christ.
His human and divine natures come together as one.
Cyril's followers squared up to Nestorius.
This really was a fight to the death because understanding exactly how Jesus was God
explained how he was powerful enough to save you from Hell.
At first Cyril seemed to have the upper hand.
He had Nestorius hounded out of Constantinople
and banished to a remote Egyptian prison.
But Nestorius' supporters remained.
And so once again a Roman Emperor was left fearing that his state would fracture.
He had to call yet more councils.
Eventually in 451 the bishops of the Empire gathered just across the straits from Constantinople
for another landmark council in Church history.
The Council of Chalcedon met to define the future of Christian faith.
The Council met just over there.
It tried to do what all Emperors want, to sign up everyone to a middle of the road settlement.
When you do that, it always helps to have a few troops around.
So the Council decreed a compromise.
In essence it backed Nestorius' oil and water emphasis -
that whilst here on earth Christ the divine and human being was
"recognised in two natures, without confusion, without change".
But in a nod to Cyril's followers, it straightaway added "without division, without separation".
And that compromise is how the Churches which descend from the Emperor's Christianity,
the Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox,
have understood the mystery of Jesus ever since.
But frankly it was a fairly shabby deal that left plenty of people unhappy.
Cyril's supporters were naturally angry,
but the followers of Nestorius felt marginalised and insulted too.
Nestorius had died a heretic in exile.
And even though Chalcedon used some of his theological language, it did nothing to restore his reputation.
The losers of the council of Chalcedon refused to fall into line.
It was a watershed. Imperial and non-imperial Christianity would never be reconciled.
Instead something new happened.
The church split for the first time, something that would happen many more times in its history.
The imperial Church now found itself focused solely on the Mediterranean.
It had no choice.
Eastern Christians were not going to be pushed around by the Emperor.
But unlike their Western cousins, Christians in the East would now have to survive
in the midst of hostile and alien religions, without the backing of an Emperor.
You might think it would be the end of them.
But in any religion, apparent misfortune can be a spur,
even stimulate expansion.
For Eastern Christians this was the start of a great adventure,
to take what they believed was the true and First Christianity to the far ends of Asia.
In the 6th century, on the eastern fringes of the Roman Empire,
Syria was emerging as an alternative Christian centre of gravity to the West.
HE CHANTS
THEY ANSWER
Priests sympathetic to Cyril of Alexandria's mixed water and wine view
of Christ, were secretly consecratedas Bishops.
A new Eastern Church was born.
It's now called the Syriac Orthodox Church.
Today its priests are trained at its headquarters just outside Damascus.
The seminary offers a glimpse of what Imperial Western Christianity
might have looked like if Chalcedon had chosen in favour of Cyril.
Instead of the rational, tidy Christianity of the West,
this is a faith which glories in mystery.
It pays meticulous attention to ritual...
..in particular to the quality of the performance.
MEN SING IN UNISON
One of the tutors at the seminary, Father Fady,
suggested to me Eastern Christianity is more in touch with its origins than the West.
What do you think is lacking in the Western Church tradition?
Well, you find the liturgy in the East to be so much richer in symbolism.
The way people communicate is not only through words, but through
gestures, through the way, you know, the person is expressing himself
through his body, or voice, tune or whatever.
Now this is very different from how Western spirituality has developed,
which was always through philosophy, so you always have theologians who
are philosophers, but in the East, you always have theologians
who are either poets, or maybe icon drawers or whatever.
All Christian worship is drama, full of sign and symbol.
But what Father Fady is claiming is that Eastern Christianity has made
a priority of passing down gestures,
which take you right back to the beginnings of the Church.
When the priest lifts the communion bread for example, it symbolizes Jesus rising from the dead.
You could say that the most important assertion
of the Syriac Orthodox Church is its claim to authenticity.
Key sections of this service are in the ancient language called Syriac.
It's a dialect of Aramaic,
the actual language which Jesus spoke.
What makes me so enthusiastic about my Church is that
the Church speaks the language of Christ,
so if you want to read the history of the Church or the spirituality
of the Church, you really need Syriac in order to access all the manuscripts
and you know the writings of the early Church.
Here, on the fringes of the Roman Empire,
was a Christianity now fully in charge of its own destiny.
These Syrian Christians honoured the memory of Cyril
and other Christians felt the same way.
Go to the ancient Church of Egypt, the Copts, or the ancient Church of Ethiopia,
and you'll find that they've not yet forgiven the Roman Emperor for the Council of Chalcedon.
But just as confidence was growing among Eastern Christians,
in the 7th century the whole of Christianity,
East and West, found itself in danger.
It had to face up to a rival,
a new militant faith...
Islam.
Followers of the prophet Muhammad began their push out
from the Arabian peninsula in 632,
conquering much of the known world with astonishing speed.
Islam brought huge damage to Imperial Christianity.
As it travelled west, it wiped out much of the southern provinces of the old Roman Empire,
It reached across north Africa,
into Spain, and into Sicily and Italy.
It even threatened mighty Constantinople.
That fight between Imperial Christianity and Islam
for the soul of Europe lasted centuries.
But the conflict also had an Eastern front.
This is one of the world's oldest mosques, the Great Umayyad Mosque.
It was built at the heart of a new Muslim Empire
ruled by the Umayyad Dynasty from here in Damascus.
Crude modern versions of history see the coming of Islam
as a "clash of civilisations", in which Islam quickly wiped out Eastern Christianity.
But the truth is rather different.
Here there was more of an encounter of civilisations.
Much like the destruction of Jerusalem in the 1st century,
the arrival of Islam was indeed a crisis point for Christians.
But Christianity proved it could meet this new challenge to its survival.
The Umayyads didn't have the resources or the inclination to force conversion on Christians.
In fact, they did deals with local leaders.
Christians did become second-class citizens and later rulers
even forced Christians to wear distinctive yellow clothing.
Much later, European Christians would do that to Jews.
Despite all that there is evidence that Christianity did influence Islam.
Christianity played a part in shaping Muslim worship.
It even affected its doctrine.
The Umayyad Mosque stands on the site of a Christian Church
and still contains a shrine said to be the tomb of John the Baptist,
this Christian saint is honoured as a prophet in Islam.
But perhaps most remarkable is the likelihood that the act of prostration during Muslim prayer
was originally inspired by Eastern Christian tradition.
I discussed all this with Islamic scholar and Syrian politician Mouhammad Habash.
According to our faith in Islam.
we believe all prophets,
as prophet of God and as messengers of God, but Jesus Christ has more.
In our faith, we believe him as a spirit of God
and we believe he is coming back exactly in this white minaret.
Oh, this white minaret. This white minaret -
it's named Jesus Minaret, because Prophet Mohammad he said.
"By God Jesus Christ is coming back to you
"exactly in white minaret in Damascus."
And here we are in this great courtyard and it's really quite natural to take our shoes off
but I have also seen the same thing in the sanctuary of a Christian church during the Holy Eucharist,
so do you think it's possible that such customs
are actually borrowed by Islam in its first days from Christianity?
My colleagues in parliament, he mentioned this one to leave off your
shoes and how to pray. He said in all the churches,
in all Christian sects, you can find the same praying as Islam, five times every day,
and you can find people who pray on the land, not on church. Believe me there is
more in common than you think between Islam and Christianity.
As Christians here learned how to live side-by-side with Islam,
one group of Eastern Christians was about to get an unexpected new lease of life.
Remember Nestorius, the Bishop who won the day at Chalcedon, but still came off the loser?
Well, adapting to the challenge of Islam
provided just the spur his followers needed to embark on their own great Christian venture in the East.
Nestorius died in exile in Egypt, but his supporters
helped build a church independent of both Imperial Christianity
and the Syriac Orthodox Church.
They based their headquarters further east, in modern Iraq.
They called themselves,
appropriately, the Church of the East.
THEY CHANT
This is one of the Church's Iraqi congregations.
It's had a presence in what is now Iraq for over 15,000 years.
Only recent wars have forced this congregation to worship in exile across the Syrian border.
It's naturally proud of its ancient lineage.
But in fact it has a much bigger significance in the history of Christianity.
That's because these Eastern Christians persuaded their Muslim rulers that they
had unique skills to offer.
Skills gained during the time they spent
arguing about the nature of Christ.
They turned Greek theology, literature and philosophy into their native Syriac to argue the case.
They became the think tank of the middle east.
So when the new Muslim Empire wanted to translate Greek science and philosophy into Arabic
it was to the ancestors of these Christians that it naturally turned.
We in the West owe the Church of the East a huge debt.
Much of what we know about Greek learning,
from medicine to astronomy and even the system of Arabic numerals in use today,
all come to us courtesy of those Christian translators.
The value of the scholars to their Muslim rulers ensured that the Church thrived.
Within 200 years of the rise of Islam, Patriarch Timothy I of the Church of the East
presided from the Abbasid capital of Baghdad
over an area that extended from Jerusalem to Central Asia
even to India, which was home to a thriving Church.
Its descendants are still there.
Everywhere in this vast area, Timothy was known by the ancient
Syriac title of respect for a religious leader, "Mar".
Maybe a quarter of all Christians saw Mar Timothy as their spiritual leader -
probably as many as the Bishop who was Pope in Rome.
So here in Syria and Central Asia, Christianity had passed a crucial test.
In contrast to the West, it was unable to rely on military strength
and so had learned to make the most of persuasion,
negotiation.
But Christianity is at heart a missionary faith,
and in the Abbasid Empire, conversion from Islam was forbidden.
So the Eastern Church had to find other ways to expand.
The solution was as radical as the later expansion of Western Christianity in the Americas.
The Church of the Middle East decided to spread to the Far East.
Christianity is now so identified with the West that we've forgotten
that long ago the belief that God became man in Jesus found fertile ground in the Far East.
But that's exactly what happened in 7th century China.
And we're beginning to understand how Christianity may have managed to survive in such an alien culture.
I met Martin Palmer, a writer on early Chinese Christianity who believes he's found the smoking gun.
The missing evidence from the Christian presence in China in the 7th century.
That's around the same time as Christianity was beginning to convert Anglo-Saxons in England.
Martin came across a map of modern day Shaanxi Province,
where there was thought to be a long lost 7th century Christian monastery called Da Qin.
To find it he needed to pinpoint an identifiable traditional Chinese landmark.
This map was a very faded pencil map, so I got out
a huge magnifying glass, put a whopping great light on it,
looked at this, read the characters and then suddenly realising I knew exactly where it was... Wow.
..because the next temple up on this map was Lao Guan Dai
and that's the temple over there.
OK. Right on that hill, that wooded hill over there.
Lao Guan Dai was the most important Daoist Temple in Tang Dynasty China.
GONG RESONATES
And now on a hillside, just across from that Temple,
Martin was looking for evidence of a Christian monastery.
The monastery seemed to have a tall typically Chinese feature,
a pagoda.
And that's exactly what Martin found, only a mile away.
It was in a terrible state then.
Now the Chinese have given it a good deal of TLC,
because it is such an extraordinary survival.
We arrived to find a 115-year-old nun and I know this is beginning
to sound like Indiana Jones, but she made tea for us
and I was desperately looking to see if I could find something with a cross on it,
so I went up the hill just to look down on it
and that's when I realised this was a Christian site.
How?
All Daoist, Buddhist and Confucianist temples face south,
that's the geomantic, the feng shui direction of Chinese temples. Yep.
All historical Christian churches face east as you know... Yep, east, west, yep.
..better than anybody else. This terrace cut into the side of the hill runs east, west.
So I ran down the hill going, "Yes, yes, I know it's true, I know it's true!"
And the Buddhist nun kind of drew herself up to her full height of five feet and stared me
in the knee caps and went, "What's going on?" So I said,
"Well, we think that this might once upon a time have been
"a very ancient Christian church", and she drew herself up even more and she went,
"Well, of course, it was the most famous Christian church in China. Didn't you know that?"
THEY LAUGH
There are moments, Diarmaid, when you just sort of think, "Thank you, God!"
The Christian monastery seems to have adopted typical Chinese architecture.
Inside the building there are sculptures, which Martin believes
survive from the Pagoda's Christian days. But when we tried to take a look, we hit a problem.
SHE SHOUTS
HE SHOUTS
Today the ground floor of the pagoda is a Buddhist Temple.
And some locals have had enough of world interest in the building
as an historical Christian site.
In spite of lengthy negotiations, I was not going to get inside.
I've a certain sympathy for the angry villagers.
When my sort of Western Christian culture bludgeoned its way by force into China
in the 19th century, it humiliated the Chinese.
They've not forgotten that.
But when long before, the Church of the East
arrived on the scene, it was very different.
And Martin was keen to show me more about the differences.
An hour's drive away is the capital of the Tang Dynasty, Chang'an, modern day Xi'an.
It is home to a remarkable museum of ancient stone-carved records known as stelae.
The so-called Forest of Stelae is really an ancient library
of classic Confucian writings, Chinese poetry and history.
And there are other stelae gathered from around this imperial capital.
One of these great stones is quite breathtaking when you realise what it is,
nothing less than an ancient commemoration
of the Church of the East in China dating back to 781.
And this is it. This is the Da Qin Stone. There's the words "Da Qin".
Now Da Qin means a big empire in the West.
The Chinese knew that there was a whopping great Empire, somewhere to the West.
Now, whether they were referring to Rome or the Byzantine Empire
or the Syrian Empire, we're not sure, but what they're saying is,
"This is the Western Empire's religion of brightness".
There's the word for religion, there's brightness,
and that was the name that the Chinese Christians gave
to their own religion, the religion of light.
But can I show you one other thing which will link you back to Syria where you've just been... Right.
..with China, because round here, on the walls here,
can you see how we've got some Syriac texts...
Oh, yes.
..and then underneath the Chinese names. Yeah.
And each one of the Chinese names starts with the same character
and that's the character for Mar meaning...
Oh, Priest! Exactly. Yes, yes.
Now what strikes me standing by all these
great stones is that this Christian one is just like all the others.
Exactly, exactly. So here we are in the year 781
in the greatest empire in the greatest period
of Chinese Civilisation that there has ever been
and we have Christianity coming, proud of its roots,
but also able to mix and move amongst the Chinese
with great ease.
Indeed, wherever they went, Eastern Christians seemed to find sympathy
in societies very different from theirs.
So the mystery is what happened to the Church of the East?
We know that in the 9th Century a new Chinese Emperor turned against all foreign religion.
The Church seemed to disappear.
This was the examination hall, but it also had a religious function.
But Martin has an intriguing theory that rather than vanish, the Church may have gone underground.
We have a record. Marco Polo, who comes in the late 13th century
loathed the Church of the East. He was a good Catholic, hated them.
He says that 700,000 hidden Christians re-emerged.
Now he probably underestimates, because he didn't like them.
Yes, he's talking about a huge number. Huge number.
So if Chinese people were prepared to put that much effort into Christianity,
what is it that has made Christianity Chinese?
Well, I think whereas the Church in the West, once it had conquered the Roman Empire, doesn't meet another
literate culture, other than Islam with which it has a few problems, until the 15th century,
the Church of the East is engaging with the greatest intellectual centres the world has.
And therefore the kind of Christianity they developed was a Christianity of dialogue,
not of conquest. They never... Never was the Church of the East imperial.
It was a Church of merchants, not of the military,
and that is a huge difference, because merchants like to arrive at a compromise.
Eastern Christianity's ability to adapt and spread without an army to back it
may have helped it survive in China at least until the 9th century.
By then Western Christianity had only just begun to make inroads into central and northern Europe.
That's a point that's often been missed.
You might say the Church of the East failed in China.
It never gained permanent favour from Emperors.
It worshipped in a foreign language, Syriac. It seemed to fade away.
But if Martin's right, it didn't completely.
And maybe the Christianity we know needs to regain its ancient ability to listen.
Today, Christianity is seen as a Western faith.
Indeed, many in the Muslim world would see "Western" lifestyles as "Christian" lifestyles.
But Christianity is not by origin a "Western" religion.
Its beginnings are in the Middle East, where there still exist
Churches which have been Eastern since the earliest Christian era.
The story of the first Christianity tells us that the Christian faith
is in fact hugely diverse with many identities.
And it shows us that far from being a "clash of civilisations",
in the East, the encounter between Islam and Christianity enriched both faiths.
And yet, for all of Christianity's ability to re-invent itself,
it was ultimately eclipsed across most of Asia.
It suffered too many misfortunes - massacre, plague, persecution.
Islam suffered them too,
but Islam had enough powerful friends to survive.
In the next episode of my history of Christianity, I will follow
the western road out of Jerusalem, to Rome and beyond.
And there we will see what happens to Christianity when it has powerful friends.
Why not take part in the Open University's online survey -
"What does it mean to be a Christian today?"
At...
..and follow the links.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk