While I am, of course, very much against attempts to rehabilitate the Nestorians (see: my jurisdiction…), something should be said for the history of the ACoE, which is filled with missionary activity from the near east to China. You do not see nearly as much missionary activity in our time (or really for the past several centuries) for the same sorts of reasons that you did not see much evangelization on the part of the Armenians or the Copts for many centuries: suppression by outsiders (pagans, Zoroastrians, Muslims, etc.) leading to marginalization
into an ‘ethnic’ community on the one hand, and opportunistic evisceration by other forms of Christianity and its missionaries on the other (e.g., Americans, Britons, and Scots in Iraq, Iran, and India; for example, the first Assyrian church set up in America in 1906 was by Assyrians from Urmia, Iran who had been converted to Presbyterianism by foreign missionaries working among them in their homeland prior to their immigration). Thus the number of ‘Assyrians’ (that itself is a loaded term, though I’ll use it here because it’s what the particular ecclesiastical community being talked about here usually calls themselves) in the ACoE is now very small when considered within the overall population of Christians adhering to some form of Syriac Christianity (some 500K vs. approximately 3-3.5 million, according to Assyrian historian Fred Aprim in his book on the political plight of the modern Assyrians; I cannot remember if he includes Maronites in that figure or not; I’m thinking not, or else it seems quite low…it is probably taken from language surveys, which would exclude Maronites and all Syriacs in India in favor of only those of the Middle Eastern churches which have kept some form of the language as a vernacular too, in Iraq/Iran/Syria/Turkey – Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Catholics, Chaldeans, and ACoE).
One good entry-level book on the historical spread of the ACoE prior to the spread of Islam and the Mongol invasions (the two forces that really turned back Assyrian gains in the East, leaving them with only tiny pockets/‘ethnic enclaves’ in our time) is Suha Rassam’s
Christianity in Iraq, now in its second printing. Rassam is some kind of Catholic, if I remember correctly, but writes extensively (or as extensively as one can in a few hundred pages) on the history of the various Christian communities in Iraq (Catholic, Orthodox, and other), detailing the spread of the ACoE at its height in quite impressive terms. I don’t have the book at hand while I write this, but from memory I believe it is relayed there that at one point around
25% of all Christians in the world paid allegiance to the Mesopotamian Patriarch, and at some point (certainly many centuries later, after this was no longer the case) the existence of this Christian community which had its own leader and did not recognize the Roman Pope baffled the likes of early Western explorers of the East such as Marco Polo.
Yes, the world was an interesting place then, no doubt…
