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THE INSIDE ASSYRIA FAQ, v 1.1
Posted by Tiglath (Guest) - Tuesday, November 23 2004, 2:47:45 (CET)
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The Church of the East also forced people into Christianity

Disruption of Religious Peace - Quote 1
A History of Christianity in Asia, Samuel Moffett
Volume 1 - Beginnings to 1500
p. 159, Paragraph 2

About 420 an alarmed Zoroastrian high priest came before Yazdegerd to complain that Christian evangelism was inducing mass apostasy from the state religion. The Christian cause was not helped by some arrogant attacks on fire temples by sincere but fanatical Christians, the most violent of whom were often converts from Zoroastrianism. The Shah could scarcely ignore open desecration of the state temples and the destruction of religious peace in his realm. He empowered the Zoroastrian clergy to persuade apostates from the national religion to renounce their conversion to Christianity and return to the faith of the empire "Not, however, by death, but by fear and a certain amount of beating."

NOTE
Dr. Samuel Moffett, Professor Emeritus at Princeton Theological Seminary, historian and a Christian missionary, makes this quote from his own book. What the paragraph tells the reader is that the Persians were tolerating the Church of the East and Christianity in their Empire until they began not only forcing their religion onto others BUT attacking the fire temples of Zoroastrian worshippers!

Moffett himself states "The Shah could scarcely ignore open desecration of the state temples and the destruction of religious peace in his realm."

It was Christianity and Church of the East brand that was disrupting the Persian Empire. What is amazing is the way in which the Shah handles the law breakers. He doesn't have them all annihalated as biased Christian history would imply, but he actually attempts to use pursuasion with them and the most extreme measures he is willing to use with the Christians is beatings. If it was the Church of the East, according to a Christian missionary like Moffett, who was destroying religous tolerance and peace in the Persian Empire then one can only wonder at what was truly happening in through a Perisan perspective.

Disruption of Religious Peace - Quote 2
Later in the reign of Yazdegerd, the Persian bishop, Abdas of Susa destroyed a Zoroastrian temple in the city; the king ordered the bishop to restore the building at his own expense. Abdas refused and the result was the order by the king to destroy all churches.

Source: A Brief History of Christianity in Iran, By Massoume Price, December 2002

NOTE
What this next post demonstrates is that the attack on a Zoroastrian fire temple was a full fledged violent attack that resulted in the DETSRUCTION of a religous Zoroastrian temple. And leading it is not a group of fanatic, recently converted Christians, who were formerly Zoroastrians, as the slightly biased Moffett implies, but leading it is none other than a Bishop for of the Church of the East!

And on top of it all the tolerant King Yazdegerd asks that the Bishop follows in King Hammurabi's ancient laws andd gives and eye for an eye and pays for the rebuilding of the temple he has ordered destroyed. Only after the Bishop's refusal are the Christian churches destroyed for having disrupted religous peace and tolerance throughout the Persian Empire.

Pax Mongolica
The Roman Catholic Church became the state religion of the Roman Empire. The term Pax Romana, was Latin for "the Roman peace", and this long period of "peace" was experienced by states within the Roman Empire not by Christian missionaries walking barefoot to Gaul, but by the fact that Roman rule and its legal system pacified regions which had suffered from the quarrels between rival leaders, forcefully.

And where its army went the priests soon followed and imposed their religion on the people forcefully.

Recently it has been revealed that their co-religionsists in the Church of the East courted the Mongols hoping to become the state religion of the entire East. They were in essence attempting to marry into the Mongolian dynasty and form a Pax Mongolica according to Samuel Moffett's History of Chrisitnaity in Asia - Volume 1.

This explains why the Church of the East consecrated Mar Yaballaha III - a Mongolian - who ruled the Church of the East from 1281 until his death in 1318. THey deliberately consecrated a Mongolian as head of the Church of the East in order to curry favour with the Mongolians and become the state religion of Pax Mongolica.

More evidence that the Church of the East actively courted the Mongolian Empire us revealed through marriage customs at the time. During that period anyone wishing to strike alliances with other foreign powers would marry into their family. It explains why one of Genghis Khan's wives was a Nestorian. The Pax Romana was used by the church to convert all of Europe and beyond to Christianity. In the East likewise the Nestorian priests who travelled to India and China used the Mongolian Empire at the time and the stability it brought with it to spread Christianity. Pax Mongolica one of the most bloodiest periods in world history was not only used by the Church of the East to head East BUT the Church of the East also desperately sought to become the state religion of this vast Empire proving that it wasn't for lack of trying that the Church of the East didn't become as bloody and violent as it's Western counterpart.
The same barbaric Mongol hordes who raised a minuurat of 70,000 heads in Baghdad in 1401 would eventually have gone down the same path of their Western co-religionsist in the West and used violence and war to further the aims of the Church of the East. There very well may have been an Inquisition, pogroms against non-believers and crimes against humanity committed by the Mongols but supported by the Church of the East had the Mongolians actually accepted Christianity as their state religion.
The Church of the East was courting the Mongols, one of the bloodiest and most barbaric of world conquerors the world has ever seen with the hope that they would eventually become the state religion of this vast Mongolian Empire. Therefore because this did not happen we can only prove that the Church of the East committed violent attacks and religous intolerance in certain incidents during its long history. Acts that would've set the precedent for even more had their courtship with the Pax Mongolica achieved fruition.



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