Article Bible in China

BECOMING THE PEOPLE’S BOOK: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE BIBLE IN CHINA By Glen G. Scorgie, Ph.D. (St. Andrews) Professor of Theology, Bethel Seminary San Diego The Third World is rising in the geo-political order of our time, and its most ascendant member is Mainland China. It is a nation of over 1.3 billion people, with at least one hundred cities of over a million persons spreading out across its landscape. The country is developing at a spectacular rate. Futurists agree that the next one hundred years will almost certainly be China’s century. In The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, historian Philip Jenkins has shown that the center of Christianity is also shifting from the West to the Third World. And David Aikman, among others, has recently sketched the remarkable growth of Christianity in China, despite official opposition, just as that nation is poised for global ascendancy.1 In God’s providence, the dominant nations in recent centuries—Great Britain in the nineteenth, and the United States in the twentieth, have been known for their robust Christian faith.2 So inevitably the question comes up: Will the same pattern of providence extend into this new century? Will China’s rising geo-political influence be matched by a vibrant Christian formation of its national soul? 1 Jenkins, The Next Christendom (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power (Washington: Regnery, 2003). 2 We note this without minimizing or sanctioning the many abuses perpetrated by these colonial and global powers. 1 To a large extent the answer will hinge on whether the Bible will ever become more than a suspicious foreign artifact, or a mere literary curiosity, in this officially- atheist nation. The answer will depend on whether the Bible becomes truly “the people’s book” of the People’s Republic of China. The struggle to make it such has been a long one, and it continues to this day. OBSCURE FIRST CONTACTS No one knows how long ago the Bible was first introduced to Chinese civilization. Some argue that many biblical concepts, especially ones from Genesis 1-11, are already mysteriously present in the characters of Chinese writing.3 Admittedly, certain of these characters do seemingly resonate—sometimes startlingly so—with biblical themes. Such parallels are intriguing, and from a pragmatic evangelistic perspective may serve well as discussion-starters with Chinese seekers today. But from a historical perspective most are problematic, since the ideograms of Chinese writing had already coalesced long before the Bible was written. Moreover, a lot of these interpretations of Chinese characters are highly contrived. Nonetheless it is at least possible that some characters reflect a shared cultural memory of ancient Near Eastern stories, and, if original Chinese ideograms continued to evolve through more recent redactions, it is possible that some witness to early Christian influence as well. There are intriguing suggestions that Christianity may have reached China as early as the end of the first century. There is an Indian tradition, for example, that the 3 For example, see C. H. Kang and Ethel Nelson, The Discovery of Genesis: How the Truths of Genesis Were Found Hidden in the Chinese Language (St. Louis: Concordia, 1979). 2 intrepid Apostle Thomas ventured as far as China.4 Supplementary evidence, recently reported in the Chinese People’s Daily, consists of tombstone carvings dated around 86 AD that depict Bible stories and Christian designs.5 But of this stage of Sino-Christian contact we have very little conclusive evidence. We do have firm data, however, from the 8th-century Nestorian Monument (or Tablet) discovered in the neighborhood of Xian.6 In 635 AD Nestorian Christian Bishop Alopen, following the Silk Route of the traders, was welcomed by Chinese emperor Tai Zong to his Tang dynasty capital of Xian, now world-famous for its Terracotta soldiers. The mission-minded Bishop Alopen and his followers were loyal to the tradition of Nestorius, one-time patriarch of Constantinople, who was deposed at the Council of Ephesus for his defective understanding (or at least tragically clumsy articulation) of the relationship between the two natures of Christ. Historian John Foster has commented suggestively that “when Christianity arrived in China, it was greeted as a ‘scriptural religion.’”7 It would be worth exploring further the basis for this assessment. How earnestly the Nestorians promoted the Bible is not known, but manuscripts from their time in China, as well as the aforementioned Nestorian Monument, reflect a Bible-based theology.8 Under later persecution, however, 4 Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in China (New York: Macmillan, 1929), 46-51; for more recent assessments of the pre-Protestant years, see Ian Gillman and Hans-Joachim Klimkeit, Christians in Asia Before 1500 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 265-305, and Samuel Hugh Moffett, A History of Christianity in Asia, vol 1. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998), 287-323, 442-69. 5 Ted Olson, “Under the Sun,” Christianity Today, 7 Oct. 2002, 13. 6 Whenever possible, the modern names of the historic sites referenced are used. 7 Quoted by R. S. Sugirtharajah, The Bible and the Third World (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 22. 8 P. Y. Saeki, The Nestorian Documents and Relics of China (Tokyo: Academy of Oriental Culture, 1937); John Foster, The Church of the T’ang Dynasty (London: SPCK, 1939), 43. 3 the Nestorians greatly declined in number and influence. The remnant that survived after 845 AD consisted mainly of foreigners.9 CATHOLIC BEGINNINGS The first documented encounter of orthodox Christianity with China occurred during the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty. Around 1271 Venetian trader and adventurer Marco Polo returned from the Mongol court near Beijing with an invitation from occupying ruler Khubilai Khan for one hundred Christian teachers of science and religion. The opportunity was not seized by the European Christian leadership with any special alacrity or vision, and ended up being essentially squandered. An intriguing artifact from this period is the Laurentian Bible, a badly-worn 13th century Latin Vulgate version now preserved in a Venetian library. It was deposited there in the 17th century by Philippe Couplet, a Belgian Jesuit missionary to China, who claimed to have collected it from a Chinese home in the province of Jiangsu. This Bible, still wrapped in Chinese silk, had been, according to Couplet, a gift to a Chinese family from Marco Polo himself. This claim is improbable; a more likely explanation is that it was taken to China by the first Franciscans in the 13th or 14th century.10 The Franciscans’ most prominent figure, John of Montecorvino, appears from 1294 onwards. Evidently he had some success in his missionary endeavors. Of special interest to us are extant reports from Montecorvino back to the Vatican, indicating that he had translated the New Testament and the Psalms into the court language of the Mongol rulers. By the end of the Mongol dynasty in 1368 there may have been up to one hundred 9 Latourette, 65. 10 Boleslaw Szczesniak, “The Laurentian Bible of Marco Polo,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 75, no. 3 (July-Sept. 1955): 173-79. 4 thousand Christian converts. But what happened to this infant church during the subsequent Ming dynasty of nationalistic Han rulers is unknown. Once again, as with the Nestorians, the Christian faith and its sacred book failed to gain a permanent niche in Chinese culture and society.11 It was like starting all over from scratch in the post-Reformation era with a Jesuit initiative spearheaded by Francis Xavier. He died off-shore in 1552, but three decades later his successor Matteo Ricci managed to enter China, via Portuguese Macao, and by 1601 had reached the Middle Kingdom’s command center of Beijing. His strategy was to appeal to the elite by consciously imitating the ways of Buddhist monks and Confucian scholars. But the Jesuits were shortly followed by Dominicans and Franciscans, and these orders were deeply suspicious of the contextualizing methods of Ricci and the Jesuits. In 1634, for example, Franciscan friars marched through the port city of Fuzhou, “holding crucifixes in the air, shouting that ‘the idols and sects of China are false, and deceits by which the devil leads them to hell forever.’”12 Conversions occurred, despite this internal row among the Roman Catholic missionaries themselves, and by the start of the 1700s there may have been up to two hundred thousand Chinese Christians. However, for the third consecutive time things ended in tragedy. The contextualizing approach espoused by the Jesuits was bluntly condemned by the Vatican, and the alternative—now empowered by Rome’s endorsement—became a growing affront to the Chinese themselves. In 1724, the Qin (Manchu) emperor banned the Christian faith altogether as insulting to the Chinese, and the indigenous church was obliged to go more or less underground. 11 Latourette, 63-77. 12 Henry Chadwick and G. R. Evans, eds., Atlas of the Christian Church (Oxford: Equinox, 1987), 122. 5 By this time there had been an active and continuous Roman Catholic presence in China for well over a century. During this span of time Ricci himself had not engaged in Bible translation, and it was not a high priority for his successors either. The sporadic attempts that were made were based, of course, on Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, rather than on the original languages of the Bible. It was true that “selections, elegantly illustrated, were published,”13 but the translation work was partial at best, and even more serious, kept virtually hidden from the general public and ordinary believers.

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