Historian explores Christianity's lost age, lands

http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN01448882

[Reuters] 22 Dec 2008--Christianity is often viewed as a Western faith which used Europe as its springboard for global expansion.

But historian Philip Jenkins argues in a new book that this narrative neglects the faith's first 1,000 years when Christianity set down firm roots in Asia and Africa - roots that flourished into huge churches but were pruned, withered and died."

We can't understand Christian history without Asia - or, indeed, Asian history without Christianity," Jenkins writes in 'The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia - and How It Died.'

He notes that churches were operating in Sri Lanka before England had its first archbishop of Canterbury and that Nestorian Christian branches were well established across Asia long before Poland became Catholic.