What if Christianity spread East and West?

What if, somehow, some Christian missionarys head to India, establishing some congregations in the northern plateau, and in Tibet. The Western Churches slowly forget about that, and it gets to the point where it is almost a legend that a monk headed to India. Christianity also heads West, and nothing much changes. Europe still has the crusades, industrial revolution, etc. What happens when the Europeans show up in India in mass around 1750, and find giant statues of Jesus carved into cliff faces in the Hindu Kush and Himilayas? Presumably, the Indian churches would be decentralized, each congregation having its own leaders, monks, etc., with all the churches united only by their beleif in Jesus, and the monks would probably have some sort of ascetism mixed in with what they already do. Assuming that this was true, and in the north of India, and the Himilayas, Christianity made up 30-90% of the population, what would this mean for the future?
 
Also, Christianity did spread all across Asia OTL, just on a smaller scale than 30-90%:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestorian_Christianity

Also, if northern India were 30-90% Christian, I think the western Christian world would learn about it by the 1300s rather than c. 1750. By that time OTL, the Catholic Church was sending Franciscan missionaries and the like this way.

Yah, there is even a rather popular POD that pops up every now and again here on this site. There were Nestorians in the court of Ghengis Khan, though he wasn't one, and the POD deals exactly with that. What if Ghengis Khan was a (fervent) Nestorian.
 

Sulemain

Banned
Yah, there is even a rather popular POD that pops up every now and again here on this site. There were Nestorians in the court of Ghengis Khan, though he wasn't one, and the POD deals exactly with that. What if Ghengis Khan was a (fervent) Nestorian.

What did they believe? Weren't they similar to Orthodox?
 
What did they believe? Weren't they similar to Orthodox?

I have trouble explaining it myself, but no, they weren't too close to Orthodox (who are far closer to Catholicism).

The difference in beliefs stems from their Christological viewpoint, which to a non believer can seem very ... fine point-ish. Early Christianity had a lot of vocal arguments about the human and divine nature of Christ, and the Nestorians were one of them.

These differences were often between people who expressed Christ as having one nature (Monophysites), those who said he had two natures (human and divine) in one body (called Hypostatic union) and those who said he had two natures (human and divine), but that they had united into one (Miaphytism).

I am making a hash of the theology, but that is the gist. Both the Orthodox/Catholics and the Nestorians believed in the two natures of Christ, but they disagreed on how those natures interacted.

Basically, Catholics/Orthodox said Mary gave birth to God/Jesus, while Nestorians said that Mary gave birth to Jesus, who was then God... I think.

Its complicated.
 
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