On "Christianity outside the Roman Empire" by F. Crawford Burkitt ***

This is essentially a short version of Burkitt's Early Eastern Christianity, as it is based on two lectures instead of five or six, and "outside the Roman Empire" for Burkitt means "eastern." 

We get a taste for Christianity as it developed outside Rome near Edessa and in other parts of the world that sat just outside its realm, where the Greek and Persian world collided, and where there were remnants of Semitic culture. Because there's little literature from this church, we don't know much about it until the middle of the second century. Burkitt sees this Christianity as having "changed less" than that further to the west, but given its predilection for ascetism, transubstantiation, and baptism only for monks (as doctrine apparently shared with the Marcionites), it would seem to me not that the church in the east changed less but that it changed in different ways--less influenced by Greek philosophy and more influenced by more eastern ways of thinking. Although Burkitt's other book on the subject is in part so long because it reproduces some primary sources in full, on the whole, it is the more thorough work and only about twice as long--thus more recommended.

On "Early Eastern Christianity" by Francis Burkitt ****

This set of six lectures is at this point the best summation of the history of the Christian Church in the east that I've read. I'm sure there are other, better, more recent works on the subject, but I haven't gotten to them yet. Burkitt, here, takes the implications of the very few sources that we have and draws out a reasonable synopsis of what may well have happened to Christians east of Palestine during the first centuries of the Christian era.

The lack of sources at the time is, of course, the central issue with research in this area. What we have comes from a period much later or is questionable legend. What we do know, however, suggests that Christianity started among the Jewish people (as we are told that it came along through merchants). The first person to bring the message, Addai, apparently died in peace, but those who followed suffered or seem out of chronological time--it's claimed, for example, that the second following Addai, Palut sought ordination from Serapion in Antioch, but that would have been long after Addai, if Addai had connection the apostles. Thus, Burkitt posits that Palut was likely connected to the Catholic church (insofar as it was connected to Rome) while those before perhaps had not been (rather, the church before was more loosely configured).

What's also interesting is how the church in the East was influence by Gnostic ideas from the East itself. So often, I've read about the differing culture in the East, but Burkitt does a good job of showing how differing Christian ideas were not just a later phenomenon. The Church in the East, thus, was a different kind of Christianity, but it was, at least by the time it enters the historical records, not much more connected to its Jewish roots than Roman church of the West.