Eastern Christianity

The terms "Eastern" and "Western" in this regard originated with geographical divisions in Christianity mirroring the cultural divide between the Hellenistic East and the Latin West, and the political divide of 395 AD between the Western and Eastern Roman Empires.

However, strictly speaking, most Christian denominations, whether Eastern or Western, regard themselves as "orthodox" (meaning "following correct beliefs") as well as "catholic" (meaning "universal"), and as sharing in the Four Marks of the Church listed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed (381 AD): "One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic" (Greek: μία, ἁγία, καθολικὴ καὶ ἀποστολικὴ ἐκκλησία).

The Eastern churches' differences from Western Christianity have to do with theology, as well as liturgy, culture, language, and politics.

The Ukrainian Lutheran Church developed within Galicia around 1926, with its rites being based on the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, rather than on the Western Formula Missae.

[10][11] The Eastern Orthodox Church is a Christian body whose adherents are largely based in Western Asia (particularly Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine) and Turkey, Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Caucasus (Georgia, Abkhazia, Ossetia etc.

The Eastern Orthodox Church is organized into self-governing jurisdictions along geographical, national, ethnic or linguistic lines.

[note 2] Today, many adherents shun the term "Eastern" as denying the church's universal character.

Oriental Orthodoxy developed in reaction to Chalcedon on the eastern limit of the Byzantine Empire and in Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia.

Historically, the Church of the East was the widest reaching branch of Eastern Christianity, at its height spreading from its heartland in Persian-ruled Assyria to the Mediterranean, India, and China.

Surviving a period of persecution within Persia, the Church of the East flourished under the Abbasid Caliphate and branched out, establishing dioceses throughout Asia.

In India, the local Church of the East community, known as the Saint Thomas Christians, experienced its own rifts as a result of Portuguese influence.

The Church of the East was associated with the doctrine of Nestorianism, advanced by Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople from 428 to 431, which emphasized the disunion between the human and divine natures of Jesus.

It experienced periodic expansion until the 14th century, when the church was nearly destroyed by the collapse of the Mongol Empire and the conquests of Timur.

By the 16th century it was largely confined to Iraq, northeast Syria, southeast Turkey, northwest Iran and the Malabar Coast of India (Kerala).

The split of the 15th century, which saw the emergence of separate Assyrian and Chaldean Churches, left only the former as an independent sect.

The Syro-Malabar Church, which is part of the Saint Thomas Christian community in India, follows East Syriac traditions and liturgy.

Other Saint Thomas Christians of India, who were originally of the same East Syriac tradition, passed instead to the West Syriac tradition and now form part of Oriental Orthodoxy (some from the Oriental Orthodox in India united with the Catholic Church in 1930 and became the Syro-Malankara Catholic Church).

The latter includes a number of diverse "low-church" groups, from the Bible-centered Molokans to the anarchic Doukhobors to the self-mutilating Skoptsy.

Starting in the 1920s, parallel hierarchies formed in opposition to local Orthodox churches over ecumenism and other matters.

[14][15] Some others are the result of reformations of Orthodox Christian beliefs and practices, inspired by the teachings of Western Protestant missionaries.

[17] Ecumenical dialogue since the 1964 meeting between Pope Paul VI and Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras I has awoken the nearly 1,000-year hopes for Christian unity.

It states that "We give thanks to the Author of all that is good, who allows us once again, in prayer and in dialogue, to express the joy we feel as brothers and to renew our commitment to move towards full communion".

Fifteen hundred years ago Christians were the majority population in today's Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Egypt.

At the beginning of the 21st century Christians constituted 6–7% of the region's population: less than 1% in Turkey, 3% in Iraq, 12% in Syria, 39% in Lebanon, 6% in Jordan, 2.5% in Israel/Palestine and 15–20% in Egypt.

[23] They also tend to be better educated than most other religious groups in America, having a high number of graduate (68%) and post-graduate (28%) degrees per capita.

[27][28][29] Byzantine science played an important and crucial role in the transmission of classical knowledge to the Islamic world.

[35] It included a medical school and hospital (bimaristan), a pharmacology laboratory, a translation house, a library and an observatory.

Later after Islamic invasion, the writings of Mankah and of the Indian doctor Sustura were translated into Arabic at Baghdad.