Christian Narratives on Jesus’ Life In Nineteenth-century China

Abstract

After a long period of prohibition and oppression under the Manchu Qing regime, the Christian enterprise in China was revived in the early 19th century with the arrivals of the first Protestant missionaries and the returning Catholic missionaries. They started a new wave of evangelical campaigns, among which the translations of the Bible and other works in Christian literature became the central task for them to accomplish. By examining a group of remarkable Chinese texts on the life of Jesus printed during this century, my paper aims to reveal how the biography of Jesus, as a literary genre based on the Four Gospels, has been transmitted from modern Europe to imperial China. On the one hand, these texts followed the orthodox Christian tradition of Shengjing (Holy Scripture) and presented the image of Jesus as the Son of God and savior of the world to Chinese readers, converts or non-believers alike. On the other hand, they continued in one way or another the Jesuits’ legacy of cultural adaptation during the 17th century, which can be exemplified in Giulio Aleni (1582-1649)’s widely popular work Tianzhu jiangsheng yanxing jilüe (Brief Records of the Words and Conducts of the Incarnated Lord of Heaven, 1635). By strategically borrowing various sources in Chinese culture, such as Confucian classics, Chuanqi (marvelous tales), and vernacular languages and dialects, these late Qing biographies of Jesus made notable efforts to localize a foreign literary genre in the Chinese context. While paving the way for a boom of indigenous Christology during the early Republican period (1911-1949), they also contributed to the integration of Chinese elements into world Christian literature by means of mutual adaptations and negotiations.