The Forgotten Eastward Spread of the Gospel — Lucas Hilty — Ep. 219

So the thing that's impressive to me is that it was—this was not a dying church. They were growing by leaps and bounds, and people wanted to follow them because of how remarkable and distinctive their life was. So while yes, we can say that some of them probably erred and probably really did go too far in a way that was harmful, nonetheless, this commitment to being spiritual athletes, as they called it, was tremendously effective when it came to spreading the church.

Well, Lucas Hilte, thanks so much for coming on the Anabaptist Perspectives podcast. You're currently teaching a course on early Christianity in the East here at Faith Builders, which is where we're at right now. And yeah, before we jump into the topic, which that's the topic for today, so a little more church history in that area of the world, but tell us a little bit about your studies into the early church in the East and yeah, kind of some of the stuff you're doing with this course. Just give us a little bit of context there.

So I first came to study the church in the East when I was interested in the beginnings of Islam and realized that actually there were Christians all around, all through Arabia at the time that Muhammad began to—well, at the time the Quran was written. And so I was interested in who they were and what kind of churches they had. And that sort of led me through one thing and another, including through reading this book, to study the churches, the Syriac-speaking churches in the Middle East in the early centuries. And so now in the course that we're teaching here at Faith Builders, it is focusing on especially the growth of those churches and how rapidly they spread right through Asia in the first centuries of the church.

So when we say—yeah, because I was looking at the course outlines and things for this year at Faith Builders and saying, you know, the church in the East or the growth of the church in the East, I'm like, okay, who are we talking about here? Can we define like what area of the world? Who were these people and what era? Just give us some broad strokes of what we're talking about.

Well, so if we step back and think about the early church, of course, at Pentecost, there were people there listening to Peter preach from really the known world, including places like Parthia, Elam, and these are all like modern-day Iran. So. Oh, that's kind of a long ways away. Yeah. So there were Jewish communities scattered throughout, you know, from the West to the East, and many of them were present in Jerusalem at that time. So right from the get-go, there were Christians probably scattered throughout these places.

And so in the early centuries of the church, there wasn't so much a concept of a church in the East versus a church in the West. They all belonged to what they referred to as the Catholic Church, meaning the one, you know, universal church of Christ.

So the church of the East, the designation and the way to think about that is more a matter of kind of two things. One is that in the West, the languages that were spoken mostly and used by the church were Latin and Greek, a lot of Greek.

But in the East, they also use Greek, but more Syriac, which is a form of Aramaic. And presumably, we think Aramaic is the language that Jesus spoke, and it was prevalent in places like Syria, modern-day Syria, modern-day Turkey, and further east. And so one of the terms that's used for the church of the East today is the Syriac church, which is not—it's different from the Syrian church. They weren't all Syrian, even though Syrian was a category that they had back then, but they were generally liked to use Aramaic. And so the Syriac church, Syriac became the language that these churches would use for centuries. It was their liturgical language and just the language that they preferred to use for religious matters.

And of course, there were then, starting in the, especially the fifth century, there were some divisions in the church. So these churches actually did leave what we now know as the Greek Orthodox Church, which wasn't really a category per se at that time either. So they left and they were expelled, actually. And so then they became the church of the East as we know them today. And so we're talking about very early in the church's story here, right? That's right. Very, very, very early. Can you give us a sense of some timelines here?

So it's, again, starting right in Acts 2, we probably have Christians, you know, in Mesopotamia and Elam and Parthia and all those, so basically in Iran today. This is, you know, the year, what, 33 AD or something along those lines.

We have records of established churches. These are organized churches with, you know, bishops and deacons and so on by the year 100 in Edessa, which would become a really important Christian city. Edessa is in modern-day southeastern Turkey, just across the border from Syria.

At the same time, we also have churches organized in what is now Iraq. And so by no more than 70 years after Christ, we have not only Christians in these places, but, you know, organized churches. And again, it's hard to get a good—we don't have tremendous documentary evidence for these areas during these periods, but really from the very earliest days of the church, we have Christians in what we now know as Iraq and Iran and Turkey.

And by the way, and India as well, which is—it's also Asia, but it's a bit of a different area, obviously. That's pretty phenomenal, actually. Like that's a long—that's a large area for the gospel to travel, especially at that time. You know, well, yeah, I'm kind of surprised. Like that early, that many places so quickly.

And you're saying some of that was, you know, you're talking about in Acts 2 where Peter is preaching and there were these Jews from all around the known world that were coming into Jerusalem at the time. That probably has a lot to do with some of those early stages, I guess, or of growth. Walk me through that a little bit. This is kind of surprising. You mentioned India, which is really far away from Israel, you know? Yeah. So yeah, walk me through that.

Well, there's a couple of ways to think about this, but the book of Acts records the—it focuses on really on Paul. We have the story of Peter there as well and some other evangelism, but we see Paul taking the gospel. And of course, he started in Antioch, which is kind of part of this eastern Syriac-speaking territory, but then he went west throughout Asia Minor and into Greece and Macedonia.

And I mean, just to say, there's a reason that the book of Acts is preserved and some of the other stories are not for us. I don't know what the reasons are. So I accept that. However, at the same time as, you know, one apostle is taking the gospel west, the others are going other places, some of them close to Judea and some of them far. And so the tradition is that the apostle Thomas took the gospel, well, first to Edessa, maybe, and then to India.

So that's the missionary impulse, if you will, of the early church. It was not just going with Paul. It was affecting all the apostles. Again, tradition has the apostle sort of dividing out the world. And we don't know exactly how they did that. And this isn't our topic today, but Africa was a huge area of evangelism, not only North Africa, where eventually we get Augustine and so on, but also, you know, Egypt and Ethiopia. Ethiopia became a really rich, strong Christian culture.

So, but that's going on. But the other thing to remember is that the world of that time, we look at it, you know, from our modern perspective, and we're aware of the world around us to some extent. We're aware of other countries and other peoples. And we tend to think that in the past, because of limited communication and limited travel, that people were not so aware of other cultures and other places. And there's probably some truth to that, but they really were—they really were connected to other places and cultures. So Edessa, which I mentioned earlier, the city which was the birthplace of Syriac as a language, it was on one of the trade routes or on several of the trade routes, actually, between China going to Turkey, as well as coming up from Palestine and connecting to Antioch.

So they had merchants. They had people who traveled the Silk Road and so on. They already had the connections that sort of helped to facilitate the spread. So it wasn't—it shouldn't actually seem, even though it surprises us, that the church spread like this. This was the kind of thing that merchants, at least, were doing already. They were traveling to India. They were traveling to China. And so Christians either—some of the merchants were Christians, and some of the Christians were sent out as missionaries. They were essentially taking advantage then of transportation systems, road systems, things that were already there. And that allowed for some pretty incredible growth right from the start. Yeah. Well, that's interesting. Okay.

Yeah. But that is something now in the modern era, modern era. Our era right now, you know, we tend not to think of it quite like that, you know. Because our evidence for the past is limited. And we just look at it—to me, it seems like we look at the past like we look backwards through binoculars, you know, and everything just gets really small. Because that's kind of the nature of the evidence that has come to us. We just get fragments of what their life was really like. And the other part of this, though, is that Jewish communities had been spread throughout that whole region as well, through deportations under the Persians, or especially under the Assyrians.

And then they were spread throughout the Persian Empire as well. Of course, we have that in the book of Esther and other places. So many of them stayed in these places and had thriving Jewish communities. And those became part of the sort of richness and strength of the Eastern Church, as well as the bane of the Eastern Church in some ways. Theologically, they would—they had to wrestle with what it meant to follow God in Christ. And some of—and they had to negotiate that with their Jewish interlocutors.

So we're looking—so that was some good broad strokes of what we're talking about with the East and when this was, I mean, like immediately after, really, the crucifixion. Tell us a favorite story that you have from the Eastern Church that kind of is a, I don't know, a good example of what we're talking about here.

So unfortunately, we don't get a lot of stories from the church during that time. We have a few sort of church orders where they would describe what church life should be and how bishops and widows and regular Christians should behave. So that gives us a glimpse into their lives. One of my favorite sources for the church during this time is something that Kreider talks about in the patient ferment of the early church. It's called the Didascalia Apostolorum, the teaching of the apostles. And it's a 26-chapter, just kind of a letter to the churches saying, here's how you should dress, here's how you should sit in church, here's what the bishop should do to keep peace, et cetera, et cetera.

And, you know, there are times when the author feels a little harsh to us, maybe moderns, but you really get a sense for the humanity of those people. You know, they were just people like we are. And as well as you get a sense for how daily their life was. You know, they weren't—we might talk about this more later, but they weren't all monks. They weren't all living off on a mountain in a wilderness. Some of them were, but some of them were going to work, applying their trades, trying to decide when they come home, whether they should stop and watch what's going on in the marketplace and maybe get into trouble or not. So you get a picture of sort of the way Christianity was working its way out in, let's say, this was a third-century document, so third-century Syria.

Ooh, yeah, that's interesting. Like, because history being so removed, it's easy to just make these characterizations of what it was like back then, but to remember these are just regular people trying to do church, trying to live a normal life like we are today. So maybe a bit of a segue off of that then, you know, these people that are very fresh, I guess you could say, off of what has happened with the crucifixion of Jesus, the early, you know, spreading of the church. What are things that we as present-day Anabaptists, you know, as present-day Christians learn from these people who were just regular people, you know, going about normal life in a lot of ways, trying to figure out this thing called church, this thing called Christianity in the very, very early years?

You know, what's a few things we can learn from them? We haven't talked about the ascetic strain of Eastern Christianity very much, but many of the records and the letters and books that have been passed down to us came from, well, the people who made it their business to read and write. So not everybody did that. But the people who tended to read and write a lot were the monks or the—there was a group called the Sons of the Covenant, Sons and Daughters of the Covenant, actually, because women were included. And so much of what they did was church work and working with the Bible and writing things.

So they passed down to us stories and teachings about a very rigorous approach to self-denial, to renouncing human society as a whole. And by that, I mean not people, but normal ways of doing things. So normally you get up and you take a shower and you trim your hair, but not if you're a monk, because you want to kind of renounce the sort of normal comforts of life because you're doing battle with your passions. And so the way that this answers, or the reason I'm mentioning this in response to your question is that I'm really challenged by, you know, sometimes their way of life seems strange, maybe mistaken to me.

But at least I think we can say on their best days, the reason they were doing it was because they loved the Lord. And they were—they took it 110% seriously, their faith. It affected even the ones who weren't monks on a mountain.

They just felt like it was an all-consuming passion to pursue the Lord, to pursue holiness, and to live what they called the evangelical life, which was not easy believism. It was a life that was patterned after the gospel.

So that became, I think, really their genius when it comes to missions. It wasn't the fact that they were so easy to join or that they required so little. It was the fact that they were such remarkable people. And again, possibly in some—they possibly overdid it, but they possibly misapplied some scripture and so on. But nonetheless, they demonstrated that they had overcome, you know, they had overcome almost human nature in their fasting, in their ascetic activity. Now, they still had human nature, but they had overcome the sort of normal way of life. And people admired that. They believed that this was a demonstration of God's power at work. And so I think we can learn—I can learn from this that the secret to growing as a Christian and the secret to being more effective in the kingdom is not to sort of chill and just float down the river of life, but it is to embrace hard things, embrace sort of the difficulty of God's call.

But to do that, not in some sort of grim, sad way of life, but to do it with kind of all the burning fire of the presence of God. And if that sounds hyperbolic, this is how they talked about it. Their poetry, they'd produced beautiful poetry, and they showed that they were yearning for what I think Tozer calls the white-hot presence of the throne of God.

And that's what stirs me up and what makes me think, I want to learn from these people. I don't necessarily need to be just like them, but I want to learn some of that from them. So you mentioned the asceticism that they had. You want to walk us through that a bit? You know, what was that element or other major components that stand out to you as this was something that was a core piece of who these people were? Walk us through some of those things.

So the asceticism of the Church of the East, or the, I should say, of the Syriac Church, is one of the things that comes through most strongly in the documents and things that are left to us.

This is why I like the Didascalia Apostolorum. That's why I mentioned that, because that helps to balance out all the ascetic documents. So not everybody practices asceticism in the way that some of these documents describe. But when Jesus said to sell all you have and give to the poor, when he said that those who enter the kingdom of heaven, they don't marry or are given a marriage, are like the angels of heaven, these folks took that and asked, how could we let me live that way?

And so there became a tradition of the monks of Syria living rather extreme lives. So they would renounce, you know, the comforts of a house, the comforts of society. Like sometimes they would have calling hours because lots of people wanted to come to talk to them and ask them to pray for them. And they'd say, well, only in the afternoon, you know, between these hours.

They did lots of things that seem extreme to us. The guy who had built himself sort of a wooden box, I didn't—the description is kind of hard to follow. He had these wheels and these wheels, and he kind of lay in the middle in a cell where he couldn't sit up. He never could stretch out. And that's how he—I'm not sure if he stayed there 24/7, but he prayed in there. A story of the guy who was—the two monks who were on the side of a mountain, and one was reading the gospel to the other. And then the reader said to the other one—the other one was, his name was Eusebius. The reader said to Eusebius, "So explain to me what I just read to you.

Tell me what this means." And Eusebius said, "Oh, sorry, could you repeat that?" And the reader says to Eusebius, "Brother, you've been so busy watching the plowmen down in the valley that you're not even paying attention to the scriptures." And he scolded him a little bit. And Eusebius was so convicted by that, they said, "All right, I will never look at the valley below. I'll never look at the stars above."

And for the 40 years that he lived after that, he would walk—the story goes—a path as narrow as a handbreadth to go to church, because he did go to church and go back to his cell. He wore heavy chains so that he didn't—so that he would be bowed down so he wouldn't see the sun or the moon and stars and so on.

These stories seem extreme. They seem unhealthy to us sometimes. But again, I think they're coming from a place of really trying to do battle with your own passions. And when you talk to this monk, he wouldn't say it's sin to look at the stars. He would say, "I am trying to exercise myself to say no to myself so the devil can't get me where it really counts, you know, in anger or lust or something." So whether he was wise to do that or not, it was this kind of thing that prevailed for a time in Manassas or something in Syria.

It seems to me possible that they were somewhat—they took the gospel and then they were kind of interpreting the gospel in the terms of their religious context. So they were in a very multi—in a very diverse religious context. There were Zoroastrians, there were Jews, there were Manicheans eventually, and Marcionites, there were Gnostics. And so all these people, many of them had sort of a disdain for the body and had a belief that the goal in life was to rise above the constraints of human nature and physicality. So you wonder if the monks were maybe unconsciously mixing some of that into the gospel in the way that they responded.

I feel like some of this has been kind of the mountain path. No, that's good though, because that's helpful context of like, this is one of the things that this—if I'm understanding you correctly—one of the things that this era and region of Christianity is remembered for. Yeah, right.

And again, like you're saying, we look at that and, whoa, that feels kind of bizarre. But it did happen and it's part of the story. Whoa, yeah, I mean, it's kind of intriguing. Like I'm listening to this and you're like, wow, okay, that's pretty serious. You know, regardless of, like you said, you know, we can debate whether it was wise or not, whatever, but they were taking this very seriously, it seems like to me. Yeah, you know, they were. And you do see the church as a whole exercising something of a moderating influence. There's a famous, probably one of the most famous monks of Syria for sure, Simon Stylites, Simon or Simeon, who lived on a stylus or a pillar for, I don't remember, decades.

And actually, he lived on several. He kept building them higher. And the reason he did this ostensibly was to get away from all the people who kept crowding him and taking away his concentration on prayer. But so he lives on a pillar. And before he did that, he was—he lived with other monks for a time. And they eventually, they had to tell him to back off. Like he wore wrapped a cord around himself that was infected with something, and it made him sick. And he did this intentionally. You know, he would do things to just intentionally suffer. And the other monks said, "Simeon, you've gone too far."

This kind of thing happened sort of progressively and repeatedly as the church said, "No, it actually counts as fasting. If you, you know, skip a few meals, you do what you can take. You don't have to feel obligated to sort of reach this ideal of the monk who eats once a week or so." So I think we actually see some maturity developing in the church. And one of the factors of that is, as I mentioned, so Manicheanism was really powerful in this region of the world, as well as Marcionites and so on. There were times when they would say, Christians would say to their people, "Look, if you're traveling, you go into the city, don't just walk into a church, because the prevalent church of that area might be Manichean, or it might be some Gnostic sect."

So what we would know is the Orthodox Christians or the Christians who later became the Church of the East were a minority among these groups at times, even a minority among those who said they were Christians. So there was a lot of diversity in that respect. And I think it's in that context that we see in the early Syriac church, there was a period where it was common for people to renounce marriage, or if they were married, to renounce sexual relationships with their spouse in order to receive baptism. So you had to be celibate to be baptized in some of these groups. And again, since the information is sketchy, it's hard to say to what extent that was the case.

And again, in the Didascalia Apostolorum, we actually see pushback against that sort of thing. But that was at least a common idea of a way to live out your Christianity is to renounce this sort of fleshly matter of marriage. And again, they had—they could look to, you know, 1 Corinthians 7. They could look to Jesus' comment about the resurrection for justification for this.

There are other scriptures that they probably should have looked at as well. But yeah, this was part of their worldview. And the thing that, just to repeat myself, the thing that's impressive to me is that it was—this was not a dying church. This was not a church that was the shakers, you know, of the US dying out because they were too severe or didn't propagate.

They were growing by leaps and bounds. And Subhan Maran, who's a writer from the 6th century in Iraq, says, "Look, it was the way the fathers or the earlier Christians, the way they lived, the way they dressed, drew attention to themselves. And people wanted to follow them because of how remarkable and distinctive their life was." And so while yes, we can say that some of them probably erred and probably really did go too far in a way that was harmful, nonetheless, this commitment to being spiritual athletes, as they called it, was tremendously effective when it came to spreading the church.

Yeah, that is really something, actually. Like that's kind of surprising to me, as bizarre as some of this stuff was. It seems, again, I'm speculating here, but this is in a very early years of the church as they're trying to figure out how to do this thing called church and following Jesus. And you get some kind of kind of some bizarre things. But regardless, it feels, it seemed like it was very earnest and attractive to the society around them. And that strikes me as like, "Oh, wow, you know, there's a lesson there for us." Right. Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know. And maybe I'm a little bit off there, but do you get a sense of that where it's like, this is people that are trying to figure it out? Like how do we do church? How do we do following Jesus? Is that a good way of saying it, I guess? I think that's right. I think significantly the reinterpretations or the other interpretations of the gospel were a factor here. So Marcion saying the God of the Old Testament is not the God that we follow. We follow the God who sent Jesus.

The Manichees who saw the physical world as evil, the Gnostics who also saw the physical world as evil. So some scholars would say that, "Oh, these were all just different kinds of Christianity, and they were just all duking it out, and eventually one side won." And that's why we have the Orthodox Christians today. Now, this isn't how the Christians at that time saw it. And I think the record reflects that there was a sort of a message that came right from the apostles that was understood by those who heard it to be a cohesive way of life, what some would call the kerygma or the deposit of faith that was passed down. So there was that, but there were these sort of pressures and competing influences.

And somebody says, just as that happens still today, the fact that we have, you know, understandings of Christianity handed down for a long time from good sources doesn't mean that somebody won't pop up and say, "No, I actually have new insight, special revelation."

They did have less history, though. They were pretty new to the faith, and so they had less history than, well, than we do today or than the church would later. And that did mean that possibly it was more open season for reinterpretations and for heresies. But what impresses me about even these fairly early writers, that one of my favorites is Afrahat, who is, again, Iraqi or Persian.

And his writing is just a compilation of scripture references, it seems like. A lot of his Old Testament, but also New Testament. And so from pretty early on, we have—they treat the Gospels and they treat the Epistles of Paul as authoritative scripture, and they're not dividing them out. They're just combining them all in a holistic approach. In other words, they see scripture, including the New Testament, as a unity. And they hadn't ironed out exactly what all was included in the New Testament maybe at that time. But the things that they did agree were New Testament, they saw that as unified, sending a unified message. So I'm not sure if that answers your question, but it does seem to me that, at least in their own self-understanding, there was a clarity about the apostolic message.

So sometimes the people who possessed that clarity may have been a minority. So before we were recording this podcast, we had had lunch, and you'd mentioned just some of the key things that had stuck out to you about the Syriac church or the church in the East, et cetera, in this era. And one of the things you mentioned was the literacy component. And we didn't really get into it too much, so I wanted to ask you about that. Like how did literacy affect that form of Christianity, or how did Christianity affect literacy? Like how did that all work, and what does that tell us today? Yeah, the matter of literacy is just personally interesting to me.

And so in the early church as a whole, as I understand it, there was an emphasis on hearing the Bible or reading it, engaging with scripture in whatever way you could. Probably many or a majority of people in the Roman Empire at that time weren't literate, or at least weren't able to access scripture of their own.

And that would have been likely the case as well in the East, in the Syriac areas. But in the year about 200, we have a school established in Edessa. And the school is there to train people to read and to train those people then to sort of maybe be monks, maybe be church leaders. Although this is the year 200, I don't know that there were many monks at this time. So it's really in the East that we have the first, or among the first, Christian schools. It seems like in the Roman Empire and in the West, it was more a matter of if you can read, you know, read the scriptures, reading is good, reading is encouraged.

But in the East, the Christian direction is setting up schools, and they run kind of like monasteries almost. They have rules of conduct and so on. This is not just seen as a place to go for a couple of hours every day just to learn reading, writing, arithmetic. It's more of a religious institution meant to train people to follow God. But reading and the scriptures are very important to these churches. And. Well, so that seems to tell—that seems to be telling us that these people did really care about like studying whatever texts were available to them at that point. I'm not entirely sure what all that would be, but like really reading, studying, learning. I mean, you're talking setting up schools and things.

Again, it's just another piece that's saying they took this really seriously in that way, right? That's right. Yeah. So to the north of what maybe we would consider the Syriac world, there we have Armenia and Georgia. Armenia was pretty closely connected to Edessa.

But in both those places, as they became Christianized, it was the Christians who wrote down, who created alphabets. Same thing that happened in Russia or the predecessor to the modern state, where Cyril and Methodius created the Cyrillic alphabet. So Christians were creating alphabets so that they could translate the scripture and write it down into these languages.

And I mentioned the school in Edessa, but there were other schools further east as well. So the monks tended to engage in reading and writing pretty extensively. That is really interesting because that feels like a real cornerstone of Christianity, really, is this ability or this desire for everyone to have a copy of God's word, to be able to read it themselves, study it, learn. It's not like, you know, great wisdom just passed down to you from someone who, well, I told you so. It's like, no, here's the text, like read it yourself. So that's fascinating that right very early on, we're already seeing a lot of evidence that that was a priority.

It was. And again, within the constraints of what was possible. Sure. So you have in the Didascalia the encouragement that if you have spare time because you don't have to work all the time, you're rich enough, then you should spend your spare time either visiting the faithful and talking about scripture, or you should sit at home and read scripture. Interesting. And so there's an assumption that possibly not everyone has that luxury, but if you do have that luxury, you should spend it with scripture. And I find it interesting that you go visiting other people who are presumed to have their own intimacy with scripture.

That, though, is in the—there's another aspect to this whole access to scripture, and that is the need to interpret scripture correctly. Because again, there's sort of a variety of interpretation of scripture, including people, whether they confess Christ or not, who would say, yes, but you need to keep the law of the Mosaic Law, we would call it. And so individuals should read scripture, but they do that in the context of a bishop and teachers who are very careful to instruct people about how to understand it. So it's not really every man for himself. It's a community that's all engaged with scripture, whether they can read it or just discuss what they heard on Sunday. And then a teaching ministry that is helping them think about how to apply it, how to compare scripture and so on.

And you see that even when they write letters explaining doctrine, explaining lifestyle, many times they just quote scripture. And that's almost like, here you go, it says this in Proverbs, done. You know, they assume that that's a forceful enough argument. It doesn't even need a lot of explanation. And so they really assume together the primacy of scripture.

But also this sense of, I'm not sitting in my corner reading it in isolation. It seems like there's a very strong community element in how they're looking at scripture. That's right. That's pretty neat because that strikes at me as a very Anabaptist thing as well, where we tend to have more of that community element, you know, trying to learn and grow together and study together. It's not just me by myself figuring it out on my own. That's pretty interesting. That early on in church history, you're already seeing that. Yeah, I didn't know that. That's fascinating. Yeah.

And you get what would maybe become very strong hierarchical systems. So the bishop and the deacons, and there are very strong calls to not violate their authority and not to do anything the bishop doesn't authorize and so on. Some of which feels uncomfortable to us because we've seen, you know, throughout history how that kind of structure and that kind of authority can feel repressive or can feel, it can be misused possibly. And certainly there are probably examples of that.

So, but suffice it to say that it arose out of a very freewheeling environment religiously where people could easily get sidetracked or misled. And so the bishops were an attempt. The bishops, their role was to keep the church thriving and to keep it safe.

Well, this has been really interesting. That was the last question I had, but as we kind of think about bringing this one to a close, what are maybe some resources if people are interested in learning more about this? What are some things you can point people to, or maybe a lesson you want to leave our audience of things that these early Christians can teach us today?

Many, not all, but many of the writings of the early Syriac Christians, so we're talking, let's say, Syriac Christians before the year 600, are available online, are available in translation, sometimes freely and sometimes not. For instance, I mentioned Afrahat, archive.org hosts all his works in English translation, a modern English translation. And so it's great to read about them. It's great to learn the history, but probably nothing is as impactful as simply reading their own writings. You come face to face with some things you really are drawn to that really call us to love Jesus.

And then if you're like me, you encounter things that you have to wrestle with. How could he say this? Doesn't he understand grace? You know, so their way of framing things was different. They didn't have all the influences that we have. They had other influences. And it's good for us to wrestle with that and ask how much we assume about the gospel, how much we assume that we understand what it means when these folks had different ways of saying things and sometimes came out in different places.

So, but Afrahat would be a good person to read. Other people like Ephraim and Jacob of Serug are great, wonderful poets. And so go ahead and find something like that and just sink into it a little bit. It's the best way to understand how much it matters to study these people.

Yeah, that's really, really interesting. Yeah, we've not done an episode on this topic at all. This is a lot of new stuff for me. So I really appreciate you taking the time compiling this stuff. It's clearly something you care about and for being willing to come on and share that with our audience. I appreciate it. Thanks for coming on, Lucas. Yeah, thanks for the conversation.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. If you found this interesting, we've done several other episodes on the early church, which you can find linked down below, as well as all the other resources that Lucas mentioned in this episode. Of course, you can always find all our content on our website at anabaptistperspectives.org. Thanks again for listening, and we'll catch you in the next episode.