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In Search of the Silk Road Christianity-Research Roadmap for the Study of the Pre-Modern History of Christianity in Asia

The history of Christianity has been written by the premise that the Europeans had disseminated the Gospel to the non-European territories, such as Africa and Asia, as the Western history of mission unfold as time went by. The general church history shows that Asia was illuminated by the light of the Gospel as the Portuguese and the Jesuits headed toward India, Japan and China during the Age of Discovery. The present author claims that this is not historically true. The origin of Christianity was possible at the western corner of Asian continent and Asia was the historical stage of pre-modern Christianity indeed. To show the evidences, the author traces the long history of pre-modern Asian Christianity which lived and prospered on the road of Silk Road. The author expects more researches on the following academic research topics in order to reconstruct the true history of pre-modern Asian Christianity: (1) Early development of Syriac Christianity in Edessa and Nisibis (2) The theology of Nestorius and its implications to the further development of Silk Road Christianity (3) The influence of Gnosticism and Manicheanism upon the eastern movement of Silk Road Christianity and the religious characteristics of the Sogdians (4) Religious encounters between Silk Road Christianity and Persian religion, i.e., Zoroaster’s religion (5) The transmitted religious role of the Ugyhur (6) The Buddhist’s encounters with Silk Road Christianity (7) Silk Road Christianity in the capital of T’ang Dynasty, China. The author supplies the most-updated research results, expecting more “co-operated” researches among Korean mission scholars. If the true history of pre-modern Asian Christianity is reconstructed, there are some strong possibilities that the early history of Korean Christianity would be altered differently.