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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 just 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 in America. I spent 36 years as a radio minister with 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 and the Universality of the Spread of the Christian Message.” In contrast, he referred to the provincial nature of these religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Shinto.

Returning to the universality and ecumenicity of the Christian faith, he elaborated on the Great Commission in Mark 16:15, “He [Jesus Christ] said to them, 'Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.’” He then turned to Romans 1:16, where Paul showed that the Gospel was meant for all conditions of men and for 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.”

Abdel-Samad stands out as a non-Western historian. In his lecture, he addressed the era’s historical context.

After Constantine’s conversion, Christianity became the state religion. This led to the adoption of the Nicene Creed as the defining statement of faith for Christendom at the beginning of the fourth century A.D.

Abdel-Samad emphasized the Byzantines’ role in spreading Christianity in Arabia before the rise of Islam in the seventh century. Muhammad was aware of Christian beliefs and assumed the role of correcting them by proclaiming God’s final revelation. In place of the Bible, Allah’s holy book became the Quran! While Christianity spread peacefully through the proclamation of the Good News, Islam spread by force. Thus, its universality was utterly different from that of Christianity.

Two notable Western historians who also wrote about Christian missions, whose works I appreciated during my theological formation, 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. He studied in Tübingen, Halle, and Berlin; taught at Mercersburg Seminary and Union Theological Seminary; promoted Mercersburg theology; edited the Schaff–Herzog Encyclopedia; and led the translation of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers.

At this juncture in world history, the historic legacy of early Christianity is best suited for the welfare of mankind.

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 Quran. After his studies in Egypt, he went to Germany to pursue his academic studies in Islamics under German Orientalists. He left his Islamic tradition and began a polemical career showing that Islam was the opposite of Modernity.