PC/WI: An apostle... in China!

Juat a crazy though I had while on the bathroom (where else?).

Simply put, how feasible is for one of Jesus' 12 disciples (except Peter), from 34 AD onwards, to travel all the way to China, arriving around 50 AD?

What would be the consequences of an earlier Christian presence during the Later Han dynasty?

Just a disclaimer: I'm not necessarily seeking a Christian China.
 
Pretty much everything we "know" about the post-Acts lives of the disciples comes from later Church tradition (sometimes much later, as in the story of St. James in Spain, which doesn't seem to appear until 700 at the very earliest), which is often unreliable and has more to do with later needs for prestige (Bishop of X is feuding with Bishop of Y over relative rankings? it turns out that the Bishopric of X was founded by an apostle, while the Bishopric of Y was founded by a generic minor cleric) or pilgrimage. It's certainly possible that if a Christian community starts up in China during the later Han, that they might at some point retroactively claim descent from an apostle, in much the same way various churches did elsewhere OTL.

Getting an actual disciple all the way to China is more difficult; they were Galilean peasants, after all, and early missionary work (both by the 12 disciples and by other early missionaries like Paul, Apollos or Barnabas) seems to have focused on areas with significant Jewish or Greek communities (and the latter seems to have been controversial with quite a few members of the early Church, as seen in Paul's epistles, especially Galatians). Unlike India (which probably didn't actually see a visit from St. Thomas, but did develop a small Christian community fairly early), China doesn't have significant numbers of either of those populations, and while there was some Roman contact with China, it was far more difficult and less extensive than Roman contact with India.
 
Oh, my bad then.

Guess my question would be more like earlier Christianity reaching the far east.
Didn't mean to come across as snapping at you; an earlier presence of Christianity in the Far East is certainly interesting (especially since the religious mix in China was still somewhat fluid, and of course places like Japan are basically a mystery). Unfortunately it's beyond my knowledge level to even hazard wild speculation about:)
 
Wasn't there a point in chinese history where it had a significant christian population? Nestorians i think?
 
Even if St. Thomas Doubting didn't go to India, the Christians in India certainly believed he had. Then there's the argument that there is a lot a Jesus Christ's teachings and those of Buddha have much in common - and there are those (can't remember names) who postulate that in the time between arguing with the Temple Doctors and the calling of the Apostles/wedding at Cana, Jesus was travelling (India and England being two of the places suggested). So, simply one needs to get some of those Indian early Christians to have to go into the area known as China for some reason. They make converts - whether they would be seen as Christians by the west is another story - and China ends up with a Christian community.

As to the Apostles going where there were significant Jewish/Greek populations I'm not so sure. Paul was going on to Spain according to his writings in Epistle to the Romans, as soon as he had taken the money he had collected for the church back to Jerusalem. Spain, AFAIK had a non-existent Jewish populace at the time, but a larger Greek one. St. Matthew was reportedly martyred in Ethiopia (another region with little contact with the Greeks/Jews), so who knows? Maybe Thomas or one of his companions/converts makes his way to China
 
Wasn't there a point in chinese history where it had a significant christian population? Nestorians i think?
Yes it was them, although who knows if it was significant enough to become the majority religion.

There was a time when there were many Nestorians in China, although they got wiped out in one or another of the purges. They were never enough to start becoming a majority, though. I believe this was in the Tang dynasty.
 
There was a time when there were many Nestorians in China, although they got wiped out in one or another of the purges. They were never enough to start becoming a majority, though. I believe this was in the Tang dynasty.
Indeed in the closing years of the Tang dynasty the emperor outlawed any foreign cult, which included Buddhism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and, IIRC, Islam. Buddhism and Islam survived (the later in limited forms) but the other were wiped.
 
Indeed in the closing years of the Tang dynasty the emperor outlawed any foreign cult, which included Buddhism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and, IIRC, Islam. Buddhism and Islam survived (the later in limited forms) but the other were wiped.
Nestorianism was also in China during the Yuan dynasty.
 
Yeah, I was hyperbolic, the point is that it never truly recovered, from my knowledge the Church of the East in China was pretty much extinct during the Ming.
Yea i think it pretty much ended during the Ming, i think one of the Patriarchs of the Nestorians was born in China though during the Yuan.
 
One critical difference between St Thomas Christians and a hypothetical community in China is that there were Jews in Kerala for centuries before Christianity appeared there, which probably made it much easier for whoever introduced the Christian teachings.

Spain, AFAIK had a non-existent Jewish populace at the time, but a larger Greek one. St. Matthew was reportedly martyred in Ethiopia (another region with little contact with the Greeks/Jews), so who knows? Maybe Thomas or one of his companions/converts makes his way to China

There's evidence that Jews had been in Spain since Carthaginian times, and fairly concrete evidence (in the form of Hebrew inscriptions on tombstones) as early as the 3rd century AD, so it's pretty likely that there were Jews in Spain around Jesus-y times and a little afterwards. And as far as Ethiopia is concerned, the Beta Israel claim to have been in Ethiopia well before that time (though the earliest records considered reliable are from centuries later)
 
Didn't mean to come across as snapping at you; an earlier presence of Christianity in the Far East is certainly interesting (especially since the religious mix in China was still somewhat fluid, and of course places like Japan are basically a mystery). Unfortunately it's beyond my knowledge level to even hazard wild speculation about:)

You were spot on about the apostles. Earlier Christianity in the far east is probably doable, for certain values of "earlier".

You basically need some sort of Christian mission going down the silk road. You could maybe do that from somewhere in Anetolia. Alternatively, if some of the Sarmatians are converted by a Roman Christian captured there, you could have Christianity spread to China via central Asia. Difficult, but not impossible.

I actually wonder if the easiest way to move Christianity eastward considerably earlier isn't to butterfly away the destruction of the Greko-Baktrians, and maintain some Hellenistic trade networks. Presuming you take a permissive enough approach to the butterfly effect to still allow for Christianity--which I most certainly do--you might see Christianity spread into Baktria, and some traders bring it to China that way.

So, yeah, it's doable, but not easy.
 
There was a time when there were many Nestorians in China, although they got wiped out in one or another of the purges. They were never enough to start becoming a majority, though. I believe this was in the Tang dynasty.

It was the Tang, and I think they got wiped out when the next dynasty came in. Philip Jenkins' book on the Nestorians--I want to say the title is Lost Christianity or something like it--has a pretty decent chapter on the Church of the East in China. I've heard from a pretty reputable person--but haven't been able to confirm--that there's been some attempt by modern Chinese Christians to hearken back to that ancient past.
 
Even if St. Thomas Doubting didn't go to India, the Christians in India certainly believed he had. Then there's the argument that there is a lot a Jesus Christ's teachings and those of Buddha have much in common - and there are those (can't remember names) who postulate that in the time between arguing with the Temple Doctors and the calling of the Apostles/wedding at Cana, Jesus was travelling (India and England being two of the places suggested). So, simply one needs to get some of those Indian early Christians to have to go into the area known as China for some reason. They make converts - whether they would be seen as Christians by the west is another story - and China ends up with a Christian community.

As to the Apostles going where there were significant Jewish/Greek populations I'm not so sure. Paul was going on to Spain according to his writings in Epistle to the Romans, as soon as he had taken the money he had collected for the church back to Jerusalem. Spain, AFAIK had a non-existent Jewish populace at the time, but a larger Greek one. St. Matthew was reportedly martyred in Ethiopia (another region with little contact with the Greeks/Jews), so who knows? Maybe Thomas or one of his companions/converts makes his way to China

Sadly for alt-historians everywhere, the legend about Jesus traveling between age 12 and age 30 is almost certainly apocrofal, not so much because it's completely impossible but because all the documentary evidence for that tradition is... really late in Christian history.

As for the apostolic traditions in far-off places like India and Ethiopia, it's impossible to verify most if not all of them. My own theory on the Thomas Christians is that they were planted by Syriac Christians possibly descended from a church either directly planted or heavily influenced by Thomas, and, for lack of a better word, things got retconned later to make Thomas seem like the direct planter. Anyway, I don't think they picked Thomas out of a hat, so to speak, even if he never got all the way to India.
 
I think so

That probably also explains why it vanished again under the Ming.

One of the challenges for Christianity in China--particularly early on--is going to be establishing it's indigeneity. To the extent that it's seen as something foreign, it's going to be marginalized at best and expelled/destroyed at worst. So probably the first thing you'd need from an early Chinese church is a liturgy in the native language, a translation of the Bible, and commentaries that situated Christianity relative to pre-existing strands of Chinese thought.

In other words, you need both a Chinese Chrysostom and a Chinese Augustine pretty early on.
 
Christianity gets to China (somehow). Local tradition insists it was founded by Joseph of Arimathea who went East in his trading expeditions. (Like the English believed he came to Britain). They also insist he counts as an apostle.

The extensive isolation of the Chinese Christians and their adaption to Confucian philosophy (rather than Greek philosophy) will mean they end up being pretty heterodox in the eyes of the rest of Christianity.
 
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