Most
people are aware that the Norse explorer Leif Eriksson was the first European
to reach America, some 500 years before Christopher Columbus, but very few know
he arrived as part of a Christian mission. Fewer still realize Leif Eriksson
was an Orthodox Christian. Having become a hirdman (guard) of the royal army of
King Olaf Tryggvason in Norway, Leif had himself accepted baptism into the
Christian faith, and had received from the King orders to travel to Greenland
with a priest in order to convert the Norse settlements there.
When
their ships were blown off course, Leif and his companions ended up in what we
now know as Newfoundland. After getting back on course, and converting the
Greenlanders to Christ, Lief and his crew returned to this Newfoundland, where
they built permanent settlements, settlements that included the construction of
churches. While the Norwegian presence in North America was short lived, the
fact that the first Christian presence on the continent was Orthodox is
significant.
Although
King Olaf Tryggvason had accepted baptism at Canterbury in England, the first
Christian rulers in Scandinavia were kinsmen of the rulers of Gardarike, or
Kiev (The Rus, of course, were not Slavs but Scandinavians, most hailing from
Sweden). King Olaf had himself grown up under the protection of Grand Prince
Valdemar (Vladimir), who famously converted the Rus to Christianity in 988.
Norse Christianity was Orthodox in tone and appearance from the beginning, and
the last of Norway’s pre-schism Christian kings, Harald Hardrada, was openly
rebuked by Rome for adhering to Eastern traditions. He brought into the
Norwegian Church a number of priests and bishops from Novgorod and Gardarike,
and also Miklagard (Constantinople), where he had headed the Varangian guard in
service of the Byzantine emperor. The first Christian presence in the Americas,
then, was not merely Orthodox in the sense of pre-schism, but had strong ties
to the cultural and ecclesiastical traditions of the Orthodox East. This fact
can clearly be seen in the interiors of the thousand year old Norwegian stave
churches that we see today.
With love in Christ,
Abbot Tryphon
(My thanks to Father Kristian, a Norwegian
Orthodox priest in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Great Britain, whose
writing on the subject I based my blog article. I hope I didn’t get any of the
facts incorrect.)
Source: https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/morningoffering/2015/09/the-first-christians/
CONVERSATION