ABSTRACT
For much of the world's population, regardless of confession, Christianity is self-evidently a European religion. This chapter provides some account of the geographical expansion of Christianity beyond the regions bordering on the Mediterranean, and also presents some ways in which these Christian groups and their practices and beliefs challenge our own understanding of Christianity, both ancient and contemporary. Missionaries from Edessa were active both in the villages and towns of western Syria, and in the east in the Iranian empire and in Armenia. The Georgians, Caucasian neighbours of the Armenians, began to convert to Christianity in the second and third centuries, and again it was the conversion of their monarch, King Mirian, in either 326 (so church tradition) or 337 (so many historians) that marked the acceleration of the process. The Ethiopian church, because of the pervasive and enduring influence from Coptic Egypt, rejected the teachings of the Council of Chalcedon, but little else is known of its early (pre-medieval) history.
