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From my earliest days, I was interested in the story of Christianity's rise and spread. In the early nineteenth century, Protestant missionaries from North America and Great Britain came to the Middle East and published Arabic-language literature, including a translation of the Bible in 1866.

When I was young, my father served as a pastor at a national Protestant church in Alexandretta, Syria, before France, the Mandatory Power, ceded the region to Turkey in 1939.

Afterward, our family’s life was upended by my mother’s sudden death a few months before WWII began. We moved to Beirut, Lebanon, where my mother’s two sisters had settled in 1935.

I’m now part of the Syrian/Lebanese Diaspora living in America. I spent 36 years as a radio minister for the Back-to-God Hour, a broadcast ministry of the Christian Reformed Church. My work involved proclaiming the Gospel in Arabic on international radio stations serving North Africa and the Middle East.

After retiring in 1994, I began publishing articles and blogging on Academia.edu and on my website as the Internet matured.

Recently, Hamed Abdel Samad, an Egyptian-German writerⁱ, spoke on YouTube about “The Uniqueness of the Spread of the Christian Message.” First, he highlighted the Message’s universality by quoting the Great Commission in Mark 16:15.

He then referred to the provincial nature of three major religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Shinto. He then elaborated on Mark 16:15 by citing its wording: “He said to them, 'Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.’” He then proceeded to Romans 1:16, where Paul showed that the Gospel was meant for all conditions of men and all places: “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”

It is important to point out that Abdel-Samad stands out as a non-Western historian. Two notable Western historians who also expounded on Christian missions are Kenneth Scott Latourette and Philip Schaff.

According to Christianity Today:

“Kenneth Scott Latourette who was the first, and until recent years, almost the only major historian to write the history of Christianity in a way that dealt seriously with its presence in all six continents. He is now mainly remembered as a historian of missions. In his view, though, it was mission that determined the nature and meaning of Christian History.”

According to Wikipedia, Philip Schaff was a Swiss-born Protestant theologian, church historian, and ecumenical leader whose works, including the multivolume History of the Christian Church and The Creeds of Christendom, set scholarly standards in the U.S. Educated in Tübingen, Halle, and Berlin, he taught at Mercersburg Seminary and Union Theological Seminary, promoted the Mercersburg theology, edited the Schaff–Herzog Encyclopedia, and led the translation of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers.

ⁱ Hamed Abdel-Samad was born to a Sheikh of a mosque in Egypt. He learned Modern Standard Arabic at his father’s mosque and memorized the Qur’an. After his studies in Egypt, he went to Germany for his academic pursuits and studied Islamics under German Orientalists. He left his Islamic tradition and began a polemical career showing that Islam was the opposite of Modernity.