For the last month on my Badlands podcast show, I have been on a run about ancient history and Christianity in late Antiquity that started with examining the deep question why the East and West use different methods for calculating the date of Easter. Coming up with ideas for shows that I can legitimately research and prepare for during the week while holding down a more-than-forty-hours-a-week day job is an ongoing challenge. Usually I go for the lowest-hanging fruit of ideas, often ones that build off the previous week. This is tempered by my knowledge that I tend to become fascinated with topics that may be rather niche to my audiences. They seem to humor me, however, even a I geek out.
I spent two show discussing ancient church councils---Nicaea, Ephesus, Chalcedon, and how the various major branches of Christianity came to split from each other. I did a show examining 7th century history and the scholarship over early Islamic history, specifically the question of whether Muhammad actually existed, or whether the name "Muhammad" was originally an epithet of Christ that was later applied to a fictional Arab prophet that became the center of a religion. I originally stumbled on this via this facinating book. I turns out there is a lot of scholarship in support of the idea, as generally the subject of the historicity of Islam has been off limits (as opposed to Christianity and the historicity of Jesus, which has been put under great scrutiny in that fashion since the 18th century in the West). As I told my audience, the idea that Muslims may actually revere a heretical form of Jesus (specifically Nestorian) makes it easier for me to have empathy with them as fellow "Crypto-Christians".
The mass conversion of Muslims to Christianity is something I can easily foresee at some point, especially as many Muslims move to the West. We should not do things that keep them from making this transition, but neither should we be shy about our faith. For what good is it, if we do not share the Gospel with others? What good are we doing for God if we say it is perfectly fine to be Muslim and to reject Jesus as Savior? If we say we are fine with it, are we, in fact, watered down Muslims ourselves? I don't have easy answers to these questions. In all things, we must act with love towards one another. Christ commands that of us. Personally I would never raise the topic with a Muslim unless they directly asked me about it. In that case I would trust the Holy Spirit to guide me in a gentle manner to provide my own testimony as a witness to the resurrection.
None of this exactly hot-off-the-presses news, but it has been fun to go through the material with the audience. Last week we examined the Dome of the Rock and its origins, as well as the efforts by Israelis (and American evangelical protestants) to promote the building of the Third Temple in its place. The earliest inscriptions in the Dome of the Rock apparently refer explicitly to Jesus and contain pre-Koranic "Koran verses" sprinkled among them. Fascinating subject.
I figure I can get one more week out of this run of topics. I could probably stay in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages indefinitely. I feel the constant need to bring in current events. The timing of my shows wa such that I was able to discuss the attack on Mar Mari Emmanuel in the context of the origins of the Church of the East, a subject I knew nothing about.
I told my audience I would probably do one more show in this run, as I mentioned, and that it would probably be about the Crusades. I would like to discuss the counter-narrative that the Crusades were a singularly horrible incident in human history, and then in many respects they were a justifiable response to Muslim aggression. At least it will give people something to think about it. Trying to shame Christians over the Crusades has long been a vector of attack by non-Christians, including secular folk in America who want nothing more than to point out how hypocrisy of Christians.
I don't know how much of a deep dive I'll do over it. I barely have time to scratch the surface of any topic during my show.
As I write this next to me is a copy of Jerusalem Pilgrimage 1099--1185, Volume 167 of Series II of the Hakluyt Society, which is a summary of primary source from pilgrims to Holy Land during the time of the Crusades. It is amazing to see that a thousand years ago, there was a "tourism" industry of westerners going to the Holy Land to see the sights, just like today. The book is a fine volume, well bound, published in 1988. I had to look up the Hakluyt Society online.
The copy I have still has the in-house paper slip from the Burnside Powell's in Portland, priced at 21 dollars. I bought it the last time I was in Portland in 2017. There is something pleasing about having bought this book about Christian pilgrims in Portland, which has gained a reputation as a city that has rejected God entirely. I pray regularly for that city and the people there. I would like to go back there and see what it has become.
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