In recent decades, missiologists have emphasized demographic shifts in the twentieth-century global church and the “coming” or “return” of global Christianity. In A Multitude of All Peoples, Vince Bantu challenges assumptions inherent in these studies, arguing that Christianity has always been a global religion. This is not a new argument for most scholars of early Christianity and late antiquity, but the history of Christianity has been taught and written from a predominantly Western perspective, largely ignoring diverse Christian traditions that took root across Africa and Asia in the first millennium. Bantu's main concern is missiological, “rooted in the dilemma of people rejecting Christianity because of the perception that it is a Western/white religion and therefore not appropriate for non-Western/white people” (6). His solution to this “missiological dilemma” is a study of non-Western Christianity in the patristic period and what he repeatedly decries as the “Western/white cultural captivity of the church.”
In his first and longest chapter, Bantu surveys the developments that led to “Western” or “Eurocentric Christian identity politics.” He begins with the conversion of Constantine and the increasing identification of the Roman Empire with the Christian religion, despite the presence of many non-Roman Christians in Persia. He discusses the problematic association of Rome with “orthodoxy” that developed in the fourth century, the boundedness of Christian theology in Hellenistic categories of thought and Greco-Roman terminology, and the problems of language and translation in the fifth-century Christological controversies. The two-nature Christology developed at Chalcedon led to the first major ecclesiastical schism, Bantu argues, resulting in the marginalization of Asian and African communities as “heretics” and the perception of Christianity as a “white man's religion” (48). He then presents a hurried overview of the Arab conquests, the spread of Islam, the reign of Charlemagne, and the enduring legacy of “western cultural captivity” with the Crusades.
Chapters 2 through 4 treat Christianization and Christian identity in Africa, the Middle East, and along the Silk Road from Persia to China. Each chapter introduces distinctive features of Christianity that took root in these regions, highlighting cultural and social aspects of theology and theological debates. These chapters introduce important yet lesser-known non-Western figures in the first millennium of Christian history: Ephrem the Syrian, Mesrop Mashtots, Shenoute of Atripe, Babai the Great, and Timothy of Baghdad, among others. Bantu shows particular sensitivity to the role of languages in shaping Christian identity. Though the book focuses on Western biases, Bantu points out that Syriac-speaking Christians, whose theological tradition was often marginalized in the West, enacted their own “cultural captivity” of people groups in Central Asia by exalting Syriac above other languages for worship (200). These chapters present fascinating examples of the indigenization of Christianity in diverse cultures of Africa and Asia long before it reached some areas of northern and western Europe. In the conclusion, Bantu returns to the missiological implications of his study for the church today.
A Multitude of All Peoples offers helpful correctives to traditional Western-oriented narratives of early Christian history. Unfortunately, this generally well-researched book is marred by inaccuracies, carelessness, and overly facile categorizations. We find, for example, chronological errors, like the reference to “the Nicene and later the Apostles’ Creed” (14) and the British historian Bede representing a particular Western view on the reign of Charlemagne vis-à-vis Islam (66), though the Frankish ruler was born more than a decade after Bede's death. In the same chapter, three citations of Robert Hoyland reference the wrong book (n197, n204, n207). Elsewhere, Bantu quotes Rufinus's Church History on the Christianization of Ethiopia but misconstrues several details in the text. Contrary to Bantu's affirmations, Meropius was not a merchant, Frumentius did not “ask” Athanasius if he could remain in Axum as its bishop, and there is no evidence that Frumentius “baptized” the Ethiopian king Ezana (98–99). While acknowledging the confusion of “Indias” in late antique sources, he cites Philostorgius's account of Theophilus the Indian on “the nature of Indian Christianity,” though the passage almost certainly refers to Arabia (185); and he points to literary and archaeological evidence of Christian culture in India that date from a period later than he claims. Bantu expresses concern about labels like “orthodox” and “heretic” when they reflect a pro-Western bias, yet he himself uses such phrases as “the heretic Constantius,” “the heresiarch Bardaisan,” and Philostorgius's “Arian gloss,” perpetuating problematic categories and perspectives on early Christian variants. His diatribes against the Western church sometimes cause him to misread his sources. For example, he castigates the “racist, condescending attitude of the Roman church toward Middle Eastern Christians” in a bull of Pope Leo X, lamenting that the pope employed the racialized term “infidel” to describe certain Christian communities of the Middle East. The passage cited, however, was commending the Maronites of Lebanon for persevering in the faith amid the “infidel” Muslims (136–137).
Bantu's discussion of Nubia best illustrates his tendency to embellish evidence that supports his points. Rightly highlighting the ancient roots of Nubian Christianity and African indigenization of the faith, he describes a tenth-century monastic wall painting which allegedly depicts “Africans worshiping the birth of the Savior wearing animal crest masks and loin cloths and holding percussive instruments.” Yet his interpretation goes much further. This painting, Bantu claims, “represents early evangelization efforts from the Nile Valley to cultures further south and west” and “the continued spread of the gospel from Africans to neighboring Africans.” He then censures “the Western church” for condemning, oppressing, and isolating the African church, leaving it open to Islam and preventing what may have been the continued spread of Christianity “to the extremities of the African continent” in this early era (95). However, the experts on this wall painting, one of whom he cites, make no mention of evangelization in their much more judicious analyses of this dancing scene.
For many students of early Christianity this book will be eye-opening, and missiologists may hail it as a pathbreaking study in their field. To be sure, A Multitude of All Peoples recenters the narrative of early Christian history and makes Christianity's global origins and identity known to a wider audience. It also exposes deeply rooted Western biases and misconceptions due to ignorance of that rich history. Yet its missiological agenda sometimes overrides concern for accuracy, and highly speculative interpretations make it less useful for historians of late ancient and medieval Christianity.
