The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> From "A History of Christianity"....

From "A History of Christianity"....

Posted by pancho (Moderator) - Monday, March 12 2012, 14:15:15 (UTC)
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"The idea of Catholic Christians exercising mass-violence against the infidel hardly squared with scripture. Nor did it make much sense in practical terms. The success of Islam sprang essentially from the failure of Christian theologians to solve the problem of the Trinity and Christ's nature. In Arab territories, Christianity had penetrated heathenism, but usually in Monophysite form, and neither eastern nor western Catholicism could find a compromise with the Monophysites in the sixth and seventh centuries.

The Arabs, driven by drought, would almost certainly have used force to expand anyway. As it was, Muhammad, a Monophysite, conflated the theological and economic problems to evolve a form of Monophysite religion which was simple, remarkably impervious to heresy, and included the doctrine of the sword to accommodate the Arab's practical needs. It appealed strongly to a huge element within the Christian community. The first big Islamic victory, at the river Yarmuk in 636, was achieved because 12,000 Christian Arabs went over to the enemy. The Christian Monophysites, Copts, Jacobites and so forth, nearly always preferred Moslems to Catholics. Five centuries after the Islamic conquest, the Jacobite Patriarch of Antioch, Michael the Syrian, faithfully produced the tradition of his people when he wrote;'The God of Vengeance, who alone is the Almighty...raised from the south the children of Ishmael to deliver us by them from the hands of the Romans.' And at the time a Nestorian chronicler wrote: 'The hearts of the Christians rejoiced at the domination of the Arabs...may God strengthen it and prosper it'...There was never, at any stage, a mass-demand from the Christians under Moslem rule to be 'liberated.'"

pp 242-243.

"In general, the effect of the crusades was to undermine the intellectual content of Islam, to destroy the chances of peaceful adjustment to Christianity, and to make Moslems far less tolerant: crusading fossilized Islam into a fanatic posture." p. 246

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