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In Jenkins' account, Iskander and Ganni are not out-of-place anomalies but rather latter-day representatives of churches that trace their lineage in a nearly unbroken line back to the apostles. The "Syrian Orthodox" arose in the wake of the Council of Chalcedon (451), when the bishops gathered at that momentous synod defined the person of Christ as made up of two natures (physis) in one person. A strong minority of the church disagreed, maintaining instead that Jesus was of one divine nature (mono-physis). Clarification: the Monophysite teaching that defines the Syrian Orthodox church separates it from the Eastern Orthodox in fellowship with the Patriarch of Constantinople.

The "Chaldean Catholics" (aka Nestorians, Assyrians, or simply the Church of the East) also arose in the 5th century as a protest against what became the standard teaching of Western Christianity and Greek Orthodoxy. Nestorius believed that Jesus was of two natures, but he held that these two natures were distinct (Mary could thus be called the "mother of the human Jesus," but not "Theotokos," the "mother of God").

It is the great merit of Philip Jenkins to remind readers that, even if the Greek and Western churches wrote off the Nestorians and the Monophysites as heretics, the communions named for these protests against standard Western doctrine did not fade away. Instead, they flourished for a thousand years—in Syria, Mesopotamia, the Arabian peninsula, India, along the Silk Road to the Far East—and have survived in many variations to this day. They even established substantial beachheads in China on two separate occasions.

One of the most intriguing by-stories of the recent explosion of Christianity in China is the insistence by a few Chinese believers that theirs is not a new, Western faith but an ancient Chinese faith. Their surprising claim rests on the Nestorian mission that established a Christian presence in the early 7th century—at about the time Muhammad called Islam into being—in the Chinese imperial capital, Ch'ang-an. This mission lasted for more than two centuries. Five hundred years later, other Nestorians took advantage of contacts with Mongol emperors to return to China for a work that again survived for centuries. These missions did not result in permanent Christian communities. But because of these early efforts, it is accurate to say that China enjoys a longer Christian history (though broken into segments) than the Christian communities of the Western hemisphere.

The Lost History of Christianity is filled with such revelations. In the year 1000, there may have been as many Christian believers in Asia and Africa as in Europe. In the 13th century, the great age of European Christian renewal associated with Francis of Assisi and Thomas Aquinas, Baghdad and other Middle Eastern centers may have witnessed roughly the same high level of spiritual discipleship and intellectual acumen.

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