A 1200 year old white marble cross weighing between three and four tons (2721 to 3628 kg) and spanning seven feet (over 2.1 meters) from top to bottom and nearly six feet across (1.8 meters) was discovered near the city of Skardu, and village of Kavardo, in Gilgit-Baltistan (an administrative territory of Pakistan) near the western Himalaya and Karakoram Mountains. While there are no Christians in the region today this provides evidence that in earlier times there was Christian community there well before Islam took control of the area.
This isn't that surprising given that one of the major routes along the historic Silk Roads, which stretched from East Asia to the Western Mediterranean, passed through Kashmir (Gilgit-Baltistan constitutes the northern portion of the larger Kashmir region). It is entirely reasonable to suppose that Middle Eastern merchants brought the Gospel to the region given that Nestorian Christian churches were in China by the 7th century and in the Indus Valley by the 5th century (although Church tradition tells of Christians first arriving in the latter in the first century).
[*The article continues with a brief mention concerning another archaeological discovery of a 1300 year old church in Israel, near to where the traditional site of Jesus' transfiguration was made*]
This isn't that surprising given that one of the major routes along the historic Silk Roads, which stretched from East Asia to the Western Mediterranean, passed through Kashmir (Gilgit-Baltistan constitutes the northern portion of the larger Kashmir region). It is entirely reasonable to suppose that Middle Eastern merchants brought the Gospel to the region given that Nestorian Christian churches were in China by the 7th century and in the Indus Valley by the 5th century (although Church tradition tells of Christians first arriving in the latter in the first century).
[*The article continues with a brief mention concerning another archaeological discovery of a 1300 year old church in Israel, near to where the traditional site of Jesus' transfiguration was made*]
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