Bethlen Almanac 1999 (Ligonier)

Cikkek - Articles

strong Semitic one. This Judeo-Christian type was essentially different from the Thomas type of Christianity. Till the XVth century, the arrival of the Portuguese, the Church of the East was homogeneous. After some peaceful years, the Portuguese turned against the Indian Christians and started to burn their sacred scriptures, saying that these are all heretic and they should turn to the original true faith which is the Roman Catholicism, and so it happened. A few decades later some native priests rebelled against it and reestablished their own Indian Christian churches. Today there are approximately 35 million Christians living in India.

Why is the history of the Church of the East interesting for us Hungarians? We know from Syrian manuscripts that the Huns (white Huns) received three bishops from the Merv diocese, and baptisms took place in 571 AD. This information gave me the start to search for the roots of our Hun-Magyar-Avar Christian tradition. We were taught in school that the Huns and Magyars came to the Carpathian Basin as barbaric and pagan people. These evidences prove the contrary. Árpád and his ancestors carried the Oriental way of Christianity from the East, intolerated by the Roman Judeo-Hellenistic type of Christianity. At the turn of the first millennium István had to make the crucial choice between the Roman and the Byzantine type of Christianity. However the ancient Hungarian Christian religion was channeled to us through folk culture and art.

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