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Title: The Jesus Sutras : Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity by Martin Palmer ISBN: 0-345-43424-2 Publisher: Wellspring/Ballantine Pub. Date: 14 August, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (10 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: In the beginning was the Tao.
Comment: Martin Palmer has packed three or four interesting books into one moderately-sized volume. First, there is the Indiana Jones-like story of how he discovered the oldest church in China, a Nestorian site that dates to the 7th Century and was apparently a center of the earliest Chinese Christianity. (X marks the spot.) Second, he and his colleagues give translations of a series of early Chinese Nestorian writings, from the famous Nestorian stele (8th Century) to later, more syncretistic works. Third, there is Palmer's reconstruction of the history of what he calls "Taoist Christianity." And finally, there are his own, always enthusiastic and interesting, but sometimes debatable, views on East, West, and how the twain might meet.
I found the combination a great deal of fun. Palmer's good cheer is infectious and understandable: he has done a clever and romantic piece of detective work. The translated Scriptures contain many striking images, and I am thrilled, as a student of the interaction between the West and China, to have these resources together, and translated into pithy English. (Though I wish he'd included the Chinese as well.) The book is, furthermore, physically lovely.
Palmer's analysis of the Nestorian church and its relation to Western Christianity is probably the weakest link in the book. He has a bit of a grudge against Western Christianity. He improbably ascribes much of what he finds attractive among Chinese Nestorianism to influence from Jainism, of all things, though the same qualities can be found in early Western Christianity. He seems to imagine the Nestorians as ecologists based on a shaky interpretation of a single Chinese character (zhen), and supposes them free of the original sin of believing in original sin, based on equally scanty evidence. (Even while one modern Chinese philosopher writes enviously of how that concept helped create Western freedom.) Nor does he notice that in one respect, the Nestorians fell far short of Western Christian tradition: they seem to have preferred buttering up emperors to rebuking them -- no Ambrose, Solzhenitsyn, or Wang Mingdao here. (The doctrine of karma didn't seem to help, as these texts show: the poor are poor because of past crimes, the emperor is powerful because of past virtue.)
Two other points may be worth mentioning. First, there is an important difference between the approach Jing Jing, the author of the Nestorian stele, took in the 8th Century, and the later "Jesus Sutras" translated in earlier chapters. The first is in my opinion an orthodox attempt to contextualize Christian thought in Asian terms, like what Matteo Ricci would do later, except that while Ricci identified with Confucianists, Jing Jing related Christianity to Buddhist and Taoist thought, or at least images. Some later sutras, by contrast, are a mish-mash of images and beliefs from the various traditions. Palmer seems to prefer the latter; I prefer the former.
Second, the word "Tao" needs some explanation. Palmer is right to call the Chinese Nestorians "Taoist Christians." But really, all Chinese Christians are "Taoist." This for the simple reason that "Tao" means "the Way," and philosophically, something pretty close to "Logos." The term does not belong to Taoists -- every school of Chinese thinkers use it, beginning with Confucius. And so the Bible reads in Chinese, "In the beginning was the Tao, and the Tao was with God, and the Tao was God" -- referring to Jesus. Furthermore, many Chinese Christian thinkers -- Lin Yutang, John Wu, Yuan Zhimin -- have felt the teachings of Lao Zi were in fact a pretty good introduction to Jesus. I think so, too.
author, True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture
Rating: 3
Summary: Well Researched but Faulty Conclusions
Comment: The Jesus Sutras is very well researched, poorly footnoted, and the author drew some faulty conclusions. Palmer assumes that the Church of the East was a confederation of churches without any central control. This is wrong. The Church of the East was highly centralized with canon law which required that all Bishops come to Bagdad every four years. Its liturgy was the same throughout the world. The texts mention of prayer seven times a day supports this. The chapter on liturgy is simply incorrect. While there may have been new theological poetry written, it would not have been used in the liturgy. Finally, the Chinese Diocese of the Church of the East adopted other traditions in the later Tang period due to its isolation and the need to address foreign doctrines. Some of these doctrines eventually were unfortunately adopted.
Rating: 4
Summary: Filet Mignon in a Bun
Comment: It's not easy to assign a single star rating to "The Jesus Sutras." You couldn't ask for a more mouth-watering subject than ancient China's Religion of Light as portrayed in its adherents' own words. But this book gives you a lot of bread with that beef. The result is a gourmet cut of literature wrapped in doughy mass of unremarkable prose. It's better than your usual junk food, but the nutritional content of the meal falls short of what it could have been.
The sutras themselves form the meat of the book. These fascinating texts, authored by the contemplatives of China's ancient Da Qin monastery, offer a remarkable view of early Christianity. Palmer brings formidable collaborators and personal skills to the effort of rendering these documents into English. This valuable service allows readers today to experience the provocative breadth of ideas explored in the manuscripts.
To serve a feast like this a simple plate works fine. Palmer serves it on a double bun from his own kitchen. In addition to the actual Sutras the reader gets "Sutras--The Adventure" and "Sutras--The History." The adventure story shows Palmer taking justifiable pride in calling Da Qin society to the attention of Western scholars. The "Indiana Jones" hype does justice neither to Da Qin nor Doctor Jones, and it's unnecessary. The merit of this investigation attests to itself. I'm sure many readers will share my interest in learning more as excavation at Da Qin proceeds. Meanwhile, the history side of the tale aims to put Da Qin society in context for the non-specialist. This results in a vivid, if oversimplied and somewhat mythologized, portrait of first-millennium Asia. Illustrations abound. The reader gets photos, maps, samples of ancient calligraphy and inscriptions. Most of these are helpful, though some (a clouded photo of a Guan Yin statue, redundant views of the pagoda) seem superfluous.
The reader soon sees, though, that Palmer's interests go far beyond scholarship-as-usual. The ancient Chinese Christians are to this book what the indigenous American peoples are to the film "Dances with Wolves." Here is a culture that offers us The Solution to Our Modern Problems. The book romanticizes Da Qin at every turn. Its history is bathed in a warm Utopian light. The author weeps when he visits its ruins. The text sidesteps even the most obvious questions that threaten to bring the subject down, even for a moment, to earth. (Why wasn't this faith more popular in its time? How much did it owe its existence to well-placed patronage in the absence of widespread observance?). As for the Sutras themselves, Palmer envisions (p. 254) how "voices from the Church's first millennium, unheard in the second millennium, could be a turning point for Church or Churches in the third millennium"--a vision that just happens to give Palmer's book a little millennial importance of its own.
At moments like this it's hard to feel we are in the best of hands. The endeavor is valid, of course. Wisdom transcends time, and here we find a community that framed the great questions of faith in novel ways and achieved a remarkable synthesis of ideas. These documents deserve to be better known. But when the person bringing us the documents holds grandiose plans for both the documents and for us, readers become skeptics. When we are told, for example, that the Da Qin monks treated women in a far more just and enlightened manner than did their Confucian and Buddhist contemporaries, can we trust the statement? Does it come from the author's research into the past or from his hopes for the future? With only the author's own book to consult as a guide, it's hard to feel sure.
Score: 5 stars for Beef, 2 stars for Bun
What readers need now is a new translation of the Da Qin sutras--a book that eschews mythmaking and illuminates the instrinsic beauty of the texts themselves. it would be welcome if this book could balance popular and scholarly interests in the textual commentary and notes. Perhaps an enterprising publisher will soon give us such a book. Until then, "The Jesus Sutras" will have to serve.
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