From Early Christianity to Islam and Back–2. Negative Developments in Christianity Before Muhammad

Between the end of the First Century CE and the end of the Sixth Century, Christianity grew but also deteriorated in a number of ways. The deterioration arose mainly from the infiltration of Greek philosophy, a change in emphasis to mass evangelism and the politicization of Christianity, followed by the questionable conversion of Constantine. These changes set up many of the specific parts of Christianity that Islam either adopted, or reacted strongly against. They also set up mucj of later European history.

A number of negative developments occurred in Christianity before the end of the Sixth Century, which both influenced the rise of Islam (indeed, may have caused it) and set up Medieval and later decay and violence in Christianity itself, as outlined below. However, I will argue that the two main drivers of these changes within Christianity itself were its attempts to win a more educated demographic and reduce persecution by seeking reconciliation with the dominant Greek philosophy of the age and the subsequent–and causally related–politicization of Christianity. The two main external drivers of negative change during this period appear to me to be Rome/Byzantium’s incessant wars with Persia and the Germanic invasions of the Western part of the Empire. The outline view of negative changes within Christianity during this period is as follows:

1. The earliest deviations from the New Testament involved attempts to make Christianity more appealing to the educated (and wealthier) classes of society by showing it to be compatible with the dominant Greek philosophies of the time.
2. The orthodox stream of Christianity taught God exists as a Trinity, Three in One, a concept which requires either a compound being or a complex being (as I have previously explained).
3. Some thinkers within Christianity, starting about the mid-Second Century, attempted to make Christianity compatible with, the concepts of the ultimate or highest deity in Greek philosophy–the middle Platonist Monad/God/“form of the good,” or Philo’s God, later drifting into Neoplatonism’s “One,”  or, later, in a very few cases, the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover. These philosophical concepts of deity are all ontologically completely simple, so insisting that a Trinitarian God be like them creates a contradiction.
4. Most of these thinkers, at least until the time of Constantine, had a mostly apologetic purpose for their work–that is, they were not trying to change the substance of Christian belief, but merely to make it understandable within the educated Hellenistic worldview to those using Greek philosophical concepts. Unfortunately, because aspects of basic Christian doctrine like the unity of the Trinity, already mentioned, are incompatible with Greek philosophical concepts, the attempt to make them fit within Greek philosophy actually subtly changed Christianity itself. However, over the period of the last half of the Second through the Third Centuries, these changes gradually succeeded in making Christianity, as amended, acceptable to many in the educated classes of the Empire.
5. Another group of ideas many of these Christian thinkers ultimately adopted from Greek (specifically Mid Platonic and Neoplatonic) philosophy was the cluster of concepts that, because of his infinite distance and difference from us in every way, and because of his immutability, all humans may really know about God is what he is not, all of the ways he is not like us.  We may not really know anything positive about what God is.
6. These same philosophical currents that influenced early Christianity also tended to deny the possibility of any real personal relationship between this “completely other” and infinitely distant and immutable God and any human being, except through a mediator or chain of mediators.
7. But, because all orthodox Christian thinkers correctly said Jesus is God Incarnate, those who attempted to reconcile these currents of Greek philosophy with Christianity also tended to minimize the possibility of any direct personal relationship with Jesus.
8. Hence, the doctrine of mediation by the organized church, and the veneration of Mary, other “saints” and angelic mediators, followed naturally.  It was the only possible reaction against Gnosticism—which speculated about long chains of semi-divine mediators—that would even give the appearance of preserving the unity of God and the infinite distance, indifference and complete “otherness” required by Greek philosophy, simultaneously. (Though usually the popular explanation of this was that Jesus, like his Father, is a stern judge who would likely kill us instantly if we tried to come before him directly). 
9. These same philosophical currents, when joined with the conversion of Christianity from a living relationship into a moral system after it became the political glue that held the Empire together (as described further below), led theologians to look for “natural” theology—i.e., the ways in which nature itself provides evidence both of the existence of the inaccessible and unknowable God and of the necessity of the ecclesiastical and moral order the Church was busily creating in his name.  This shift toward natural theology was very gradual, and not fully developed until the high Middle Ages.
10. During the same period that most of the Gentile church was seeking social acceptability through reconciliation with Greek philosophy, the bulk of the Jewish church was taking an opposite path—seeking acceptability by making themselves more Jewish (Judaism was a religio licita in the Roman Empire—in fact, it was the only religion that was tolerated by the Roman state without incorporating Roman state worship into its own worship). 
11. The Council of Jerusalem recorded in Acts 15 provided a temporary solution to the rift between Jewish and Gentile believers.  But, within a hundred years after the Council, most of the Jewish believers had departed into their own Jewish sects that believed in Jesus as the Messiah but also insisted on following Jewish customs and observing the Law of Moses. 
12. In the centuries after Constantine, most of the remnants of these “heretical” Jewish Messianic sects that hadn’t left already were exiled from Roman territory, mostly to Arabia.
13. See the series “Heresy is Division in the Church” for an extended explanation of the statement that the true definition of “heresy” is “divisiveness,” not “disapproved doctrine.”
14. The attempts to attract the upper classes by stating doctrine in ways compatible with their dominant philosophical thinking subsequently led to the most fundamental change in Christianity, which was the transformation of Christianity into a group of worldly political entities, with human leaders, which ruled their members.  This occurred gradually.
15. This change to a politicized church was well underway in some parts of the Empire even before the “conversion” of Constantine I to Christianity in 312 CE–and went forward in some areas in spite of the persecutions under Constantine’s predecessor Diocletian.
16. The politicization of Christianity coincided with a change in its mode of growth.  The original form of evangelism occurred mostly on a personal level, seeking to win individuals to true faith in Christ, with church membership limited to people believed to know in whom they had placed their faith.
17. Over time, starting in earnest about the last half of the Second Century, there was a gradual shift to an emphasis on “mass evangelism” as described by Ellul, that is, “winning” large groups of adherents en masse by appealing to their leaders, who would, after joining the official organized church, either influence or coerce those under their authority to do the same. 
18. The advantages of “mass evangelism” of this type were that it greatly reduced persecution in areas where secular leadership was behind the church, that it gave the official church impressive numbers and prestige, and that it gave the church access to wealth and power to accomplish its “mission.” 
19. The part of the Roman leadership structure where “mass evangelism” proved possibly the most effective was the Legions and their officers. Military units led by Christians, whose lower ranks followed suit, became a major political force.
20. There were seven primary disadvantages of the “mass evangelism” approach. The first was that,  in order to sell Christianity to secular leadership, Christianity itself had to be transformed into a tool the powerful could use to maintain their control, thus those parts of the Scriptures that can be read as requiring blind obedience to all authorities, patient submission to poverty and injustice, and maintenance of the existing order, had to be emphasized.
21. The second great disadvantage of the “mass evangelism” approach was that the influx of many new church members who really had no personal faith in Christ required increasingly rigid distinctions between the clergy and the laity.
22. The third great disadvantage of the “mass evangelism” approach was that the influx of many new members who did not have the Holy Spirit required an accelerated shift toward one-way rote teaching of credal formulas to the masses, and enforcement of the uniformity of profession of those formulas, in place of real personal faith.
23. It is obvious that the New Testament solution to the sin within us—the resurrected Jesus living within us—only works for people who have an actual relationship with Christ and are yielding to him in it. It has no application to people who are still fleeing from him just because they are called “Christians.”
24. Therefore, the fourth great disadvantage of the “mass evangelism” approach was that it required an almost complete de-emphasis upon living by the Spirit in an ongoing relationship with God, in favor of living by moral rules devised and enforced by the organized church. 
25. This shift to living by Church-made moral rules was, obviously, necessary because most church members were lightly-Christianized pagans who did not have the Holy Spirit within them. 
26. The shift to moralism was also necessary because the leaders of the church were rightly revolted at the waves of violence and blatant immorality that were engulfing Roman culture—and were coming into the church as it admitted waves of unconverted pagans.
27. The fifth great disadvantage of the “mass evangelism” approach was that it required that the most important leaders of the church should be chosen from the social elite, based on their political clout rather than their spirituality.
28. With the advent of “evangelism” of whole groups of people, starting with their political or social “leaders,” came the need to greatly centralize power in the organized church to make it the political equal of the secular leaders with whom it dealt. 
29. The power of the bishops, and, particularly, of the most important metropolitan bishops, started to be greatly magnified, a process that went to completion after the Roman church formally became a tool of the Roman state.
30. Therefore, sixth great disadvantage of the “mass evangelism” approach was that, for all of the above reasons, it effectively disenfranchised Christians from the lower classes and from disfavored ethnic minorities (like Syriac speakers in Roman Syria and Mesopotamia, Copts and Berbers), who no longer were allowed control of the local congregations or the clergy who ministered to them.
31. Finally, the seventh great disadvantage of the “mass evangelism” approach was that it required a large degree of syncretism with the pagan religions to which the new “converts” had previously been attached, in order to keep them comfortable enough that they would not rebel.  Pagan temples were seized and remodeled into churches that were attended by the same people who had previously worshiped there.  Pagan deities were given the identities of Christian martyrs—“saints”—whose real or mythologized ministries had included miracles of the same kinds as those previously attributed to the pagan deities.  Pagan holidays were transformed into saints’ days.  Pagan concepts of the sacred and of the spirit world entered the church.
32. Because of the perceived need to maintain both uniformity and strict conformity to the increasingly rigid hierarchy, as a means of maintaining social and, later, political order, the organized church was forced to adopt a very expansive, technical legal definition of “heresy,” and to make the “crime” of “heresy”—which had never been a crime before, only a cause for temporary exclusion from the local church—punishable by exile or death. 
33. Because of its uniformity-maintaining purpose, “heresy” was defined in terms of any deviation, even in private belief, from each group’s official body of teachings, rather than as actual argumentativeness or divisive intent.  
34. Similar things happened to the concept of “blasphemy,” which was transformed from a repentable sin with a fairly narrow definition (speaking evil of God or taking a false oath), to a civil and religious crime with a broad and elastic definition (speaking against any God-ordained authority).
35. The problem of what to do with church members who abandoned the church in times of persecution by doing homage to the Roman state cult, or who fell for a time into a group deemed “heretical,” and who later tried to return to the church, had been a problem of the persecuted early church from the beginning.  However, the concept that “apostasy” should be a crime was supported, very questionably, by only a single New Testament reference, Hebrews 6:4-6 (where it clearly doesn’t refer to an offense against any human authority).  It was not defined as a “crime” against the church and state until after Constantine gave Christianity, in a single form, legitimacy as the preferred religion of the Roman state.   Not long thereafter, the Donatist “heretics” forced the issue of the appropriate penalty by insisting that those who had apostasized during Diocletian’s persecution (which included many bishops of Constantine’s church!) should be permanently excluded from the church—which meant exile from the realm as well.  Constantine and his church hierarchy rejected this, making “apostasy” a repentable offense (though severe penances were sometimes required), and anathematized the Donatists (who were mostly disenfranchised Berber and Punic Christians).
36. Many—possibly most—of the movements deemed “heretical” between the late Second and Seventh Centuries CE either arose or became popular among ethnic or social groups that had been disenfranchised by the poiliticization of the organized church in the Roman empire, at least in part as a means of group empowerment. 
37. Most of the major disputes with “heretics” within the organized Church between the Second and Sixth Centuries CE involved in some way attempts to define the relationships within the Godhead, the similarity between Jesus and ordinary humans, or the presence and meaning of sin within human nature and consequently the ability of ordinary believers to have a real, direct relationship with God.
38.   Further, all of these major disputes with “heretics” were officially resolved with compromise doctrinal formulations, usually formulated by councils under the thumb of an Emperor.
39. Though each of these compromise credal formulations contained truth, each was worded in a manner that could be (and commonly was) read to deny Jesus’ similarity to us and the possibility of a real personal relationship with him, in keeping with the actual experience of the masses of lightly-Christianized pagans which now filled the organized church.
40. Most of these disputes, and much of the formal creation of credal formulas in technical ecclesiastical language (rather than either popular language or the language of the New Testament), in response to them, involved attempts to make Christianity compatible with the conceptual framework of the dominant Neoplatonic philosophy, in order to make it more acceptable to the educated upper class.  The problem with this is that the fundamental Neoplatonist concept of the deity—infinitely distant, totally other, and out of direct touch with the material universe and the humans in it–is incompatible with the God of the New Testament who remains directly involved with his Creation and desires a relationship with humans.
41. The requirement that church members frequently recite, and declare with great emotion their unreserved agreement with, doctrinal formulas they often could not understand—both because they were written in technical theological language and because the popular language itself was changing—also served as a convenient test of loyalty to the official church hierarchy.  The setting in which the creeds were recited was a large group setting, so intense peer pressure was on the side of conformity. And anyone who refused to declare faith in a creed they could not understand, just because the hierarchy said it was true, could be punished as a “heretic,” with the full approval and participation of their entire community.
42. The struggle over the relationship of God the Son to God the Father was officially, but rather insecurely, settled for purposes of the Roman church thirteen years after Constantine’s accession, at the First Council of Nicaea (325 CE), a council held under the Emperor’s thumb.  The Council’s resolution of the issue, stated in technical theological language that attempted to mollify the moderate Arian segment of the Church while simultaneously rejecting the Arian position, stated, if read  correctly, that the Father and Son  are one, equal and co-eternal, thus rejecting the Arian contention that that the Father existed before the Son and created him.  However, this was stated using non-Biblical  terms borrowed from Greek philosophy, which everyone knew the orthodox would read one way and the Arians another way.
43. The formula of Nicaea failed to mollify the Arian party, and the conflict continued at the highest levels of the Roman church and state until the time of Theodosius I, who took office in 380 CE.  The office of Emperor changed hands between (orthodox) Athanasian and Arian Emperors several times during this period.  Each such change led to a new wave of exiles to places outside the Empire, like Arabia.
44. Just to the north of the Western half of the empire, the Goths and Vandals remained Arian Christians even after 381.  The Goths sacked Rome in 410 and gradually overthrew what remained of the Western part of the Empire in the years following.  But they were tolerant of the orthodox Catholic church in their dominions.
45. After politicization of the church, Jesus’ divinity was emphasized and his humanity was de-emphasized. 
46. The mystery of the  union of the divine and human elements of Jesus’ nature into “one Person (prosopon) and Substance (hypostasis),” as officially explained in the years after the Council of Chalcedon (451), tended to emphasize that this union was something only Jesus has ever possessed, or been able to possess, so that Jesus, though fully human in the human aspect of his nature, was really not like us.  (Note that the actual words of the Confession of Chalcedon can be read in a way which is correct, but this correct reading has not been the most common interpretation in the years since the Council).
47. One of the implications of the general conviction that the hypostatic union rendered Jesus unlike us in his humanity was that his temptations were seen as unreal, because the mysterious union of his two natures rendered him incapable of sinning.  Rather, under this interpretation, the temptation narratives in the Gospels are presented as a means of emphasizing Jesus’ natural superiority to us, that he most pointedly was not like us, in that he was incapable of sinning under circumstances that would have defeated any ordinary mortal.
48. But, as already noted, with politicization two of the principal objectives of institutionalized Christianity became to control the moral behavior (the “sins”) of a mostly unsaved society  AND to make adherents dependent on the authorized hierarchy. 
49. Consequently,  the focus of Christian teaching  changed from Jesus’ death and resurrection providing a remedy for “sin” to the sole authority of the ordained representatives of the established hierarchy to dispense forgiveness of individual “sins” in exchange for works of outward obedience (penance), dispensing to penitent sinners the “merit” earned by the obedience and death of Christ and the “saints” piecemeal to pay for their “sins.”
50. This emphasis on “sins” over “sin” also led to an elaborated doctrine of “original sin” which emphasized that Adam’s act of disobedience created a transmissible moral blemish rather than the heart tendency to seek its own way instead of God’s, which is “sin.” 
51. This transmissible blemish was said to be paid for by Christ’s death, but the availability of life in his resurrection to overcome inward sin was de-emphasized as inapplicable to most “Christians” (who were now connected to Christ only through the sacraments of the official church, not by personal relationship). 
52. For most “Christians,” all that was available was absolution of individual “sins” through the sacraments of the Church and, aspirationally, an improved lifestyle through compliance with the moral teachings of the Church, God’s blessing, and the uncertain “hope” of eternal salvation if they finished their course well enough.
53. This also, in turn, led to a shift in symbolism, from the empty tomb and the ichthus as symbols of Christianity in early centuries, to an almost exclusive Cross symbolism, and veneration of the Cross, in later centuries. 
54. Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross was seen as a source of the merit dispensed by the church and was also easily manipulated into a symbol of all of the sacrifices the church asked its ordinary members to make “for” Christ, to secure the merit it dispensed.
55. Where those asserting to speak in local churches by the Holy Spirit, exercising one of the spiritual gifts of Romans 8 or 1 Corinthians 12-14, were initially regulated by those with the gift of discernment of spirits and the principle of keeping meetings orderly, this became impractical as churches became more politicized and many nonbelievers were recognized as members.  It was fairly quickly replaced by practices similar to (and sometimes more rigid than) the modern practice of limiting the speaking roles to ordained clergy or to trusted laymen following prepared scripts.
56. Because Christianity became first a tool of politics then a tool of statecraft, the voice of God speaking constantly to individuals had to be suppressed in favor of a voice that comes only occasionally through the official organs of the organized Church.
57. Along similar lines, the original concept of a Kingdom of the Heavens in which God is perceived as present and active all around us and accessible to each of us by faith had to be replaced with a static Kingdom of God which is either i) precisely identical to the formal, organized Church, acting only through its official organs (including the actions of cooperative governments);  or ii) located entirely in the eschatological future.
58. In gradually adopting many of these changes, all of the official churches also tacitly adopted a form of material versus spiritual dualism. This is seen most clearly in the distinction that came to be made in the Roman and Byzantine branches of the church between the moral commands binding on everyone and the “counsels of perfection” (poverty, chastity and obedience) binding only on the clergy and those in monastic life. 
59. But even the common moral regulations binding on everyone came to contain many regulations based on the premise that the physical world and the body are evil.
60. The suppression of God’s voice, except when speaking though authorized clergy, and the limitation of God’s present kingdom to the official acts of the organized church, also reflect this dualism.
61. Historically, monasticism arose in Christianity as a reaction against the monopolization of power in the official church by the social elites as a result of the politicization of the church, which also had the results of limiting God’s voice and any openly professed direct relationship with God to them. 
62. Though it had some early opponents, monasticism was ultimately accepted by all of the official churches, where “heretical” movements that reacted against the same shift in power were  violently rejected, because: 1) the monastic movements always remained subject to the official hierarchy; 2) the monastic movements practiced asceticism (the “counsels of perfection”) even more strictly than the secular clergy, and thus could said to have “earned” their mystical encounters with God and held up as positive public examples; 3) as monasticism grew, monks and monasteries were perceived to be useful as scriptoria,and places of scholarship and charity; and 4) possibly most importantly, monks withdrew into their own isolated cells or isolated communities and did not disturb the ordinary business of the churches very much.  
63. Politicization was followed, after Constantine, by the conversion of Christianity into a tool of statecraft in the Roman Empire.  This ultimately took different forms in the Eastern and Western parts of the Empire.  In the East, the Emperor was always dominant over the affairs of the Church.  In the West, due to barbarian invasions, the feudal secular authority structure came to be regarded as “the secular arm of the Church.”  But in both realms Christianity became a tool of statecraft, the maintainer of order. 
64. The gift of discernment of spirits, which had already been rendered mostly superfluous by the movement toward rigidly regulated liturgy, was completely suppressed after Constantine, because it would have been very unseemly for a person claiming to speak by the Holy Spirit to call the Emperor or one of his appointees unsaved or to denounce one of their pronouncements as wrong!
65. All of the above led to a reactive adoption of non-orthodox forms of Christianity by disenfranchised ethnic minorities in the Empire (e.g., Copts, Berbers, rural Syrians) and ethnic churches outside the Empire that needed for political reasons to maintain their distance from Rome, the political entity (e.g., Goths, Persians, Armenians, the churches in border states of Mesopotamia, Axum).
66. However, initially  most—and ultimately all—of these doctrinally separate national or ethnic movements that were anathematized as “heretical” by the Roman/Byzantine orthodox church (and generally returned the favor), developed the same emphasis on uniformity in doctrine and practice as an artificial form of unity, and on moralism, as had occurred in the official, orthodox Church.
67. At the individual level, official Christianity in all of these groups was transformed from a living relationship with God through Jesus into a system focused on obedience and submission to a body of doctrine, to a moral code, to a set of rituals, and to all human authorities.  The only real distinctions between the groups were their ethnicities, some details of doctrine and liturgy, and the names of the authorities to whom all must unquestioningly submit.
68. This was also accompanied by development of canon law as a code governing the doctrine, morals and practices of the official church (with parallel developments in nearly all of the “heretical” branches of the Church). 
69. The loss of a speaking God and of real individual relationship with Christ, in favor of a uniform individual client relationship with a human church organization, transformed the living Word of God, a person who lives within us, into just a Book, which exists to support the human authority structure, as reflected in a series of derivative books, written traditions and human laws.
70. For all of the above reasons, the development of a position among all national Christian movements that it is right and necessary to persecute heretics, as officially defined, resulting in waves of exile of different groups to fringe areas (upper Egypt, Mesopotamia, Arabia, Persia) outside Roman control starting in the Fourth Century.
71. Over the next few centuries, as its politicization occurred, Christianity abandoned its initial pacifism, at first timidly, but wholeheartedly after its merger with the Empire and its confrontations with the “heretical” (Arian) Christian Goths and Vandals close to home and with the mostly ethnic minority (Berber and Punic) Donatist “heretics” in North Africa (the “breadbasket of the Empire”).
72.  Augustine developed his theory of “just war” specifically to justify military action to eradicate the Donatists. 
73. Augustine, and the Christians who generally followed his approach before the rise of Islam, generally believed a “just war” was a necessary evil, not a positive moral good or a means of earning merit before God.
74. As the drift toward “just war” occurred, there also arose a tendency to give unbalanced emphasis to scriptural metaphors of the Christian life that involve warfare over other, more peaceful metaphors that suggest guidance and a shared life.
75. The development of national and ethnic “heresies,” of the “just war” theory, and the changes in underlying Christian metaphor and symbolism to support war against “heretics” and individual sacrifice “for” Christ, led,  by the time of Muhammad, to the division of Christianity into a group of factions that were very visibly at war with each other. 
76. Most of these warring factions had representatives in Arabia.  
77. One of the early effects of the politicization and institutionalization of the Church was the progressive limitation of the roles of women in the organized Church.  (Ellul describes this in The Subversion of Christianity, pp. 80-91). 
78. Initially, the roles of women were limited mostly because the characteristically feminine empathetic, cooperative approach to conflict, though very similar to what Jesus taught, was not seen as practical by male church leaders and the male political leaders to whom they were appealing.  What was seen as practical was assertion of authority, a characteristically masculine response.
79. The roles of women were also limited because the early Christian approach to equality was too much at variance with a popular culture that denigrated and exploited women.
80. As the process went forward, the roles of women were also limited because the church was rightly revolted at the waves of violence and blatant immorality that were engulfing Roman culture—first from within, and later as a result of barbarian invasions and constant warfare with Persia. 
81. The men in charge of the church were particularly sensitive to the sexual immorality of the culture—which was often a cause of, or joined with, violence (just as today)—and, like Adam, blamed women for it. 
82. The result was a development of a Christian moral code which treated sexuality much more strictly than any other part of life, and put most of the burden of that code on women, who were to be silent, obedient, chaste and refrain from doing anything that tempted, threatened or challenged men.
83. However, the organized Church continued to recognize women as necessary, and to recognize, at least in theory, that God created man—male and female—in his image. 
84. So, to justify the marginalization and subjugation of nearly all women presently in existence in Christian-ruled lands, the Church i) began to venerate Mary (though its Byzantine branch divided over whether she was the Theotokos [“God-bearer” or “Mother of God”] or only the Christotokos [“Christ-bearer”]); ii) later began to venerate female “saints” who had been martyred or in some other way exemplified elements of the “proper” role of women; and iii) after the full development of monasticism, allowed a relative few women who had taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience to do some serious intellectual work in settings (convents) that did not threaten male dominance. 
85. There were three other unfortunate results of the shift to “mass evangelism” and politicized Christianity.  The first was that the existing, competing church organizations, other than the Western branch of the Roman church, tended to limit their formal, “mass” evangelistic efforts to larger and more “civilized” groups outside their present scope of operations—mass evangelistic targets that were considered to be worth the investment. 
86. Thus, by the Sixth Century, the “Nestorian” Church of the East had missions in every major city on the Silk Road and, by 635 CE,  in the Tang capital of China, but only a few monks and scattered congregations in Arabia.
87. At the same time, most of the Western Roman church’s mass evangelistic efforts were directed at groups of Germanic “barbarians” who had invaded, or seemed about to invade, their territories, with a major motive of converting groups of military enemies into groups of allies.
88. The second unfortunate result of the politicization of the church on outreach to new peoples was that the perceived need to preserve doctrinal uniformity around creeds formulated in only one or two languages, and the perceived need to be able to detect and eradicate any “heresy” in its early stages, militated in favor of “freezing” not only the creeds, but also all available copies of the scriptures and the liturgy, in the same language(s) as those in which the accepted versions of the creeds had originally been promulgated. 
89. But the centuries immediately after the era in which the creeds and basic liturgies were permanently fixed were centuries of great upheaval, of the spread of the organized church (either by conquest or mass evangelism) to many new people groups, and of great linguistic change. 
90. This led to a situation in which most of the (compulsory) members of the organized church not only had no personal relationship with its Head, but could not understand its teachings, which were presented mostly or only in a language foreign to them.
91. One area greatly, and early, impacted by these changes was Arabia, which contained exiled Christians from a number of warring sects, and some Arabs (including, apparently, one whole Bedouin tribe and most of the population of an Arab-Persian-Byzantine border state) who had become Christians, but who could obtain the Scriptures, and regular teaching about them, only in a foreign language (Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic or Greek, depending on their location and personal connections), if at all.   
92. As of 610 CE, all of the Arabs’ Christian neighbors considered them “backward,” and believed they needed to be “civilized” (i.e., brought under more centralized political and social control) before they could be brought, en masse, into the official church.  Possibly because of this prejudice, no one seems ever to have bothered to translate the New Testament into Arabic until more than a century after the rise of Islam.