The opening post of The Administration of tongues happens to meet that very same litmus in the NT.
This is what gets me, brethren of your persuasion quote 500 years AD as if it was the day after Jesus died. Who knows how much doctrine really morphed in that huge amount of time?
And my core dogmas are based upon the New Testament as well. And having studied so many different 'expert' historical views I've came to the end of myself. That's when it takes what the bible calls 'being enlightened or led into the truth by The Spirit of Truth'. Not saying I still don't have mistakes, but hey, welcome to Christianity 101 IMO. So, until the day that Jesus lets us all know how stupid we all were, I think it's more important to get along, than to think our 'doctrinal box' is without flaw. To think that way simply manifests the religious spirit that the devil has used to splinter the church for 2000 years IMO.
Well, all I know is it was orthodoxy who killed anyone who also didn't agree with 'the Church' when it became the 'Political/Religious' governmental force on the face of the earth back then too. Anyone who didn't agree was slaughtered...so much for a church in the likeness of the Jesus whom I believe in. Just saying.
That is untrue, entirely. You are confusing us with the Roman Catholic Church. In particular, to my knowledge, the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch has never martyred anyone.
We, the Oriental Pethodox, were persecuted first along with the Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox by Constantine's successor Constantius, who tried to brutally suppress Nicene Christians in favor of Arianism. This continued until Emperor Theodosius came to power around 379. However, Theodosius then swung the other way, and against the vehement protests of such pre-eminent saints as Ambrose of Milan, burned a Spanish heretic at the Church. Later, his court exiled St. John Chrysostom for criticizing their opulent and lavish lifestyle, resultimg in his death.
Then in 451 at the Council of Chalcedon, the Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox falsely accused Pope Dioscorus of Alexandria of being a Monophysite and began a thousand year persecution of the Oriental Orthodox, basically, the predominantly non-Greco Roman Christians who followed him. The EO and the RC mainly spoke Greek and Latin, whereas the Oriental Orthodox primarily spoke Coptic, Syriac, Classical Armenian, and Ge'ez, so the desparate attempts of the OO to explain our innocence fell on deaf ears; the persecution of Oriental Orthodox by the Eastern Roman Empire was so bad that we initially welcomed the Islamic caliphates. It wasnt until the fall of Constantinople to the Turks for example, that Armenians were allowed to live there.
However then the Muslims begin persecuting us, particularly in Egypt, where the Mamluks tried and succeeded in coercing the apostasy of many Copts, and suppressed the vernacular use of Coptic by cutting out the tongue of anyone heard speaking it in public. Thus the ancient Egyptian tongue, the direct descendant of the language of the Pharoahs, became, like Latin, purely a liturgical language, used in church rituals but no longer as a primary language of conversation.
Similar hardships were imposed on the Eastern Orthodox, who also after their Great Schism with the Roman Catholics, suffered continual attempts from Western European powers to subjugate them and forcibly convert them to Catholicism, efforts which largely succeeded in the case of the West Slavic people (the Czechs, Carpathians, Polish, and so on, who were either brought straight into the Latin speaking Catholic church or else an Eastern Catholic church. And in India, likewise, an attempt was made to forcibly convert the Syriac Orthodox Christians of that subcontinent to Roman Catholicism, who were originally evangelized by St. Thomas the Apostle. The initial bishop sent by the Patriarch of Antioch, Mar Ahatullah, was further murdered and dumped in the sea by the Jesuits, but his successor got through, and since then the Indian Orthodox have persevered with us despite a number of messy schisms, and at one point the embezzlement of all their gold reserves by the British East India Company, which was used to set up a schismatic church under an Anglican friendly Indian bishop who embraced Protestant theology. The Anglicans were also highly duplicitous in their dealings with the Coptic Church in the 19th century, attempting to convert the Copts by the backdoor by setting up free schools that taught Reformed theology as well as the usual primary school syllabus to Coptic youth; fortunately, the Pope realized what was going on, drove out the Anglicans and had the Coptic Church take over the schools. Even today the Copts run a large number of orphanages in Egypt due to a cruel Islamic law that forbids orphaned children from being adopted.
So as a result the Eastern Orthodox, caught between the Muslims and the Roman Catholics, and later the Lutheran Kingdom of Sweden, became the allies of the Oriental Orthodox: The Greek amd Coptic Popes of Alexandria in fact sought to unite in the 19Th century but were obstructed by the Khedive, but since then, a state of near communion exists between those churches and also the Syriac and Greek Orthodox Patriarchs of Antioch are effectively in communion following the absuction of their Archbishops of Mosul and joint persecution by ISIS, and rhe Russian and Armenian churches for strategic reasons developed a certain closeness since Tsarist times. Frankly, the relationship I think was a bit healthier than that between Russia and the fellow Eastern Orthodox Church of Georgia,,which for a time was forcibly integrated into the Russian church and had its national identity suppressed by Moscow; that dark era is long behind us however.
So it is now possible to speak of one Orthodox Church, even though we are a long way from full intercommunion and reconciliation between the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox.
Thus, if you must insist on a technical breakdown, the 40 million or so Russian Orthodox victims of Stalin belong to the same Eastern Orthodox church that did persecute heretics, albeit never on the scale of Roman Catholic attrocities like the Albigensian Crusade and the Piedmont Easter.
However, that still leaves the Oriental Orthodox with several million victims of Stalin, several million victims of the Turkish Genocide (I reckon five million Syriac and Armenian victims plus ten-fifteen million victims of the Communist regime, mainly Armenian), then over 1600 years, about 10-20 million victims of the Islamic caliphates and the Muslim Mongol despot Tamerlane, who killed most Syriac Christians, and then over a thousand years, between Chalcedon in 451 and the fall of Constantinople in 1453, five to ten million victims of the Roman Empire.
We also certainly should be said to have a claim on the martyrs of Pagan and Arian Rome, specifically those of Egyptian or Syrian identity.
And from this grand total, one can deduct almost no signifigant incidents of persecution. There were no Oriental Orthodox crusades or inquisitions, and to my knowledge we never burned any Christian at the stake no matter how grave their heresy, something you cant say about John Calvin or Thomas Cranmer, or many other key figures of the Reformation. So factorimg in the odd abberation, I will generously guess that at most, uneducated rural laymen may have killed a hundred or so over the centuries. So our ratio of, lets say, 30 million confirmed martyrs, to 100 hypothetical victims, looks pretty darn good I think, all things considered.
These figures exclude the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which, while Oriental Orthodox, was always largely isolated from the rest of us, and historically did not face the same enemies.
Again thanks for the rebuke...hope I don't need another one for this last little 'truth'.
