M esopotamian Christianity

Abstract

Abstract Christianity, which has been in Iraq from its earliest times, has played several important roles in its history. Northern Mesopotamia saw the growth of early Christianity around what today is Arbil, while southern Mesopotamia saw Christian churches flourish in Basra. The center of the Church of the East between the 5th and 8th centuries was Seleucia Ctesiphon, not far from Baghdad, to which city it moved when the Abbasids made it their capital in 749. Today Baghdad is the center of the largest Christian church in Iraq, the Chaldean Church, although sectarian violence has induced Christians once again to leave for the safer regions of northern Iraq. Continuous emigration makes any figures necessarily outdated; before the fall of the Baath regime in 2003 the percentage of Christians in Iraq was estimated at about 3 percent of the population (c.550,000 people). Roughly 50 percent of these belong to the Chaldean Church, 30 percent to the Assyrian Church of the East and the Ancient Church of the East, 15 percent to the Syrian Orthodox and Syrian Catholic Church, while the remaining 5 percent are distributed between the smaller Orthodox churches and the Latin, Protestant, and evangelical churches. The census for the year 1951, however, gave a figure as high as 6.4 percent of the population, suggesting a gradual decline due to emigration over the second half of the 20th century. Present rates of emigration make observers fear for the complete disappearance of Christianity from Iraq.