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Silk Road Religion

Decent Essays

How has the spread of religion along the Silk Road influenced our lives, decisions, and actions today as a society of diverse individuals?

Religious beliefs of the people of the Silk Road changed radically over time and was largely due to the effects of travel and trade along the Silk Road. For over two thousand years the Silk Road was a network of roads for the travel and dissemination of religious beliefs across Eurasia, which not only affected the population, trade, standard of living but also affected how these people who were influenced by the road perceived the idea of religion along with facing a conflict between their current religion vs the new ones they were coming to know about.
Trade created possibilities for the expansion of religion. The religious beliefs of people along the Silk Road at the beginning of the 1st century BCE were very different from what it is now. When China defeated the nomadic Xiongnu confederation and pushed Chinese military control northwest (in the 2nd century BCE), Buddhism was known in Central Asia but was not yet …show more content…

The Christianity of the Silk Road was primarily the form known as Nestorianism, after the teachings of Nestorius, a 5th-century patriarch of Constantinople who soon outraged the Roman and Byzantine worlds with his unorthodox doctrines, such as taking from the Virgin her title “Mother of God.” Nestorian Christianity spread to Persia, India, and China, bringing with it the Syriac language and script (the basis of the writing systems of several Central Asian languages); a famous inscribed stela (standing stone tablet) in Xi’an, dated 781, commemorates the official arrival of Nestorian missionaries in China. By that time, Nestorian churches were to be found in cities all along the Silk Road, though there were undoubtedly many fewer Christians than Buddhists in Central

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