Christianity in Asia

According to tradition, further eastward expansion occurred via the preaching of Thomas the Apostle, who established Christianity in the Parthian Empire (Iran) and India.

It has significant minority populations in South Korea, Taiwan, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, Vietnam, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Israel, Palestine (including the West Bank and the Gaza Strip), Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and several other countries in Asia with a total Christian population of more than 295 million.

One of the key centers of Christianity became the city of Antioch, previous capital of the Hellenistic Seleucid Empire, located in today what is modern Turkey.

Antioch was evangelized perhaps by Peter the Apostle, according to the tradition upon which the Antiochene patriarchate still rests its claim for primacy,[4] and certainly by Barnabas and Paul.

[8] The earliest known references to Christian communities in Central Asia is from a writing by Bar Daisan around 196 AD: "Nor do our sisters among the Gilanians and Bactrians have any intercourse with strangers".

[9] The Sasanians also proved rather tolerant of the Christian faith until the persecution by the Zoroastrian priest Kartir under Bahram II (276–93 AD).

[10] An early third-century Syriac work known as the Acts of Thomas[10] connects the apostle's Indian ministry with two kings, one in the north and the other in the south.

According to the Acts, Thomas was at first reluctant to accept this mission, but the Lord appeared to him in a night vision and compelled him to accompany an Indian merchant, Abbanes (or Habban), to his native place in northwest India.

[12] Piecing together the various traditions, the story suggests that Thomas left northwest India when invasion threatened, and traveled by vessel to the Malabar Coast along the southwestern coast of the Indian continent, possibly visiting southeast Arabia and Socotra en route, and landing at the former flourishing port of Muziris on an island near Cochin in 52.

In accordance with apostolic custom, Thomas ordained teachers and leaders or elders, who were reported to be the earliest ministry of the Malabar church.

Thomas next proceeded overland to the Coromandel Coast in southeastern India, and ministered in what is now the Madras area, where a local King and many people were converted.

So according to the Syriac version of the Acts of Thomas, Mazdai, the local king at Mylapore, after questioning the Apostle condemned him to death about the year AD 72.

Anxious to avoid popular excitement, the King ordered Thomas conducted to a nearby mountain, where, after being allowed to pray, he was then stoned and stabbed to death with a lance wielded by an angry Brahmin.

In 845, the Chinese authorities implemented an interdiction of foreign cults, and Christianity diminished in China until the time of the Mongol Empire in the 13th century.

[31] Following the East–West Schism of 1054, various efforts, over several centuries, were made at reuniting eastern and western Christianity, with the objective of putting both under the rule of the Pope.

In 1272, John of Montecorvino was commissioned by the Byzantine emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos to communicate with Pope Gregory X, to negotiate for the reunion of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.

At the same time the unionist controversy helped drive Byzantium's Orthodox neighbors Serbia and Bulgaria into the camp of Michael VIII's opponents.

For a while the diplomatic intent of the union worked out in the West, but in the end Pope Martin IV, an ally of Charles of Anjou, excommunicated Michael VIII.

He laboured largely in the Mongol tongue, translated the New Testament and Psalms, built a central church, and within a few years (by 1305) could report 6,000 baptized converts.

Other priests joined him, John was consecrated a bishop, and centers were established in the coastal provinces of Jiangsu (Yangzhou), Zhejiang (Hangzhou) and Fujian (Quanzhou, known to Europeans of the time as "Zaitun").

Under John's influence, many Mongols, such as those of the Ongut tribe, changed allegiance from the Eastern Nestorian (Syro-Oriental) Church, to Western Catholicism.

[35] Following the death of Monte Corvino, an embassy to the French Pope Benedict XII in Avignon was sent by Toghun Temür in 1336, requesting a new spiritual guide.

The colonisers then proceeded to proselytise as they explored and subjugated the remaining parts of what is now the Philippines until 1898, with the exception of parts of Mindanao, which had been Muslim since at latest the 10th century CE, and the Cordilleras, where numerous mountain tribes maintained their ancient beliefs as they resisted Western colonisation until the arrival of the United States in the early 20th century.

Members of the Jesuit delegation to China were perhaps the most influential of the different Christian missionaries in that country between the earliest period of the religion up until the 19th century, when significant numbers of Catholic and Protestant missions developed.

At the time of their peak influence, members of the Jesuit delegation were considered some of the emperor's most valued and trusted advisors, holding numerous prestigious posts in the imperial government.

The Church in Korea survived without any formal missionary priests until clergy from France (the Paris Foreign Missions Society) arrived in 1836 for the ministry.

[38] During the 19th century, the Catholic Church suffered persecution by the government of the Joseon dynasty, chiefly for the religion's refusal to carry out ancestral worship, which it perceived to be a form of idolatry, but which the State prescribed as a cornerstone of culture.

The abbey was never united with or changed into a diocese presumably due to the lack of effective church activity in the area since the division of Korea at the end of World War II.

Today, Christianity is the predominant faith in six Asian countries, the Philippines, East Timor, Cyprus, Russia, Armenia and Georgia.

In both conservative (the UAE) and moderately liberal (Malaysia and Indonesia) Muslim states,[citation needed] Christians continue to enjoy freedom of worship, despite limits on their ability to spread their faith.