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William Bentley began his tenure as assistant pastor of the East Church in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1783, and immediately came into conflict with the much older senior pastor. But within two years, the senior pastor was gone, driven out by the church he had served for half a century. That minister, James Diman, was a Calvinist, but Bentley believed in a theology of salvation called Arminianism—in the benevolence of God and the possibility of salvation through moral behavior. The church's members picked Bentley's Arminianism over Diman's Calvinism. How and why they did so sheds light on the power of the sacraments (Communion and baptism) in New England Christianity, on the unique relationships in Congregationalism between members, parishioners, and pew proprietors, and on the liberating potential of the American Revolution, particularly in the economic power gained from privateering.

The prologue narrates both the formative years of Bentley's life before his call to the East Church in 1783 and also the history of that church before that date. Born the son of an artisan father in Boston's North End in 1759 but educated at Harvard thanks to his own intellectual skills and the financial largesse of his maternal grandfather, Bentley began and continued through his life straddling two social worlds, a tension that would later help drive his ideological changes. Meanwhile, members of the East Church were no longer satisfied with their pastor after the Revolutionary War. They wanted a corresponding change of leadership in their own spiritual community. They could not easily dismiss their existing pastor, but they could call an assistant pastor in order to bring the conflict to a head. In Bentley they found their man and in 1783 invited him up to Salem.

Bentley's importance peaked in 1805. Never again would he assume such a public or intellectually significant role as he did between 1783 and 1805. Nor would he bridge the chasms separating him from his liberal peers and from his evangelical contemporaries. Although he remained the pastor of the East Church until his death in 1819, in every real sense of the word he died alone.

This chapter discusses theological speculation and theological literacy in late antique and medieval Middle East. In the period beginning with the controversy between Cyril and Nestorius in 428 and ending with the Third Council of Constantinople in 680–681, the Christian community of the Middle East splintered into separate and competing churches as a result of disagreements over theological speculation. There was chronic and irresolvable controversy as to how many natures, persons, energies, and wills there were in the Incarnate Christ. The variety of distinct and competing churches that developed include the Chalcedonians, the Miaphysites, and the Church of the East. The question of literacy complicates things further. An estimate of literacy among Christians in the first several centuries AD suggested that no more than 10 percent were able to “read, criticize, and interpret” Christian literature in this time.

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to recover the social and political circumstances of worldly Christians and the perspectives of the Zoroastrian elites whose positions were always supreme in Iranian political culture. It substitutes a triangular relationship among ecclesiastical leaders, Christian secular elites, and Zoroastrian authorities in place of the binaries that East Syrian texts rhetorically constructed. The goal is not to unmask the agendas of East Syrian authors and leaders but rather to demonstrate the interplay of their literary constructions with the shifting social and political structures and relationships in their communities. The remainder of the chapter discusses the empire known in Middle Persian as Ērānšahr, “the Iranian Empire,” the most enduring and territorially extensive imperial system in the ancient Near East; the Church of the East and its institutions; and Christian and Zoroastrian texts and their contexts.

In chapter 8, I analyze the hagiography of Ahoudemmeh, a Miaphysite missionary in northern Iraq who converted Arabic tribes. I show how his hagiography displays the unique concerns of the Miaphysites living in the Sasanian Empire. I discuss how the story demonstrates the internal conflicts of the Church of the East and Miaphysite Church. The hagiography of Ahoudemmeh symbolizes the ambiguities of the religious and political affiliations of the Sasanian Miaphysites.

In chapter 1, I lay out a methodology for studying the missionary stories of the Syriac churches. I discuss the image of the hagiographer, the missionary, and the monarch. I examine the theological disputes from the fourth through the sixth centuries that played a role in the separation of the Church of the East and the Syrian Orthodox Church from the Byzantine Chalcedonian Church. I show how I will use the missionary stories of the Syriac tradition to discuss the gradual process by which the Church of the East and the Syrian Orthodox Church became separate ecclesial bodies.

This chapter examines the History of Blessed Simeon bar Sabba'e and two other texts from among the Syriac Acts of the Persian Martyrs: the Martyrdom of the Captives of Beth Zabdai and the Martyrdom of Pusai-Qarugbed. All three sources demonstrate a pronounced trend in the discourse of late fifth-and early sixth-century Syriac martyrdom narratives: the conceptualization of Persian Christians during Shapur II's reign as Roman captives. This chapter considers how and why these Syriac martyrdom narratives speak about Christians as Roman captives. It argues that these Syriac martyrdom narratives discuss “Roman captives” not only because of the Sasanian practice of taking hundreds if not thousands of prisoners of war, but also because of the history of the spread of Christianity in Persia; the two founding synods of the Church of the East, in 410 and 420; and the brief war between Rome and Persia that followed the Sasanian king Yazdgard I's death in 420.