Jingjiao theology: translation, doctrine, and religious practice in Tang China (618–907)

Abstract

This thesis is a study of a historical form of Christianity in Tang China (618–907), known in Chinese as Jingjiao. This term, meaning ‘Luminous Teaching’, is the Chinese name that Christians in the Tang era gave for Christianity. Jingjiao or Tang Christianity was one of the first fruits of the encounters between Christianity and Chinese culture, or, more precisely, encounters between the Church of the East (or East Syriac Christianity) and Tang Chinese culture. This thesis is primarily a theological investigation. It seeks to explore in what ways the extant texts and artefacts ascribed to Jingjiao facilitate our understanding of the translation of Christianity into the Tang Chinese context.

As regards the primary sources, this thesis focuses on a group of Tang Christian texts (mostly in Chinese and partially in Syriac) and artefacts that were accidentally unearthed and then identified in the course of the last four hundred years. Hence, our knowledge of Jingjiao is due to such historical contingencies with a succession of archaeological discoveries in Xi’an, Dunhuang, and Luoyang. This group of Tang Christian texts was formerly ascribed to ‘Nestorianism’, a problematic and Western-oriented conception imposed on Jingjiao. Jingjiao was also hastily identified as Buddhist, Daoist, or anything other than itself.

Based on the previous scholarship, this study puts these scattered and fragmentary pieces (texts and artefacts) together in an attempt to construct a fuller picture of Jingjiao in Tang China. What we call the Jingjiao corpus in this thesis signifies a certain way of piecing these scattered materials together and thus a systematic way of reading or seeing them.

Therefore, the study aims at listening to the voice(s) that the Jingjiao corpus expresses.

While focusing on this specific group of texts and artefacts (including scrolls and stone inscriptions), what we call the Jingjiao corpus, this study is concerned with a broader issue of the translation of Christianity. To put it another way, this thesis particularly explores how Christian doctrines and practices that were received and shaped in the East Syriac tradition were translated into the Tang Chinese context. Here, translation is far from an intact transfer from the source language to the target language. Neither is translation simply about semantics or linguistics. The idea of translation explored in this thesis involves an in-depth or extensive engagement with a particular culture (Tang Chinese culture) that a particular language (Chinese language) carried and represented at that time and space.

Moreover, translation does not necessarily signal a subsidiary status. Rather, the Jingjiao corpus being relatively autonomous shows us all sorts of dynamics and creativities in translation.

With an awareness of the specific historical context, Chapter 1 describes historical factors that contributed to the emergence of the Jingjiao corpus: the Church of the East in Mesopotamia and Iran, the Church’s missions along the Silk Road, and the social milieu and religious contours in Tang China. Chapters 2 and 3 then pick up the doctrines of the Creator God, the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and Christ in the Jingjiao corpus. Translating each of these doctrines into the Tang Chinese context involves engagements with the pivotal ideas and concepts in pre-existing religious traditions such as Buddhism and Daoism during the Tang period. Chapter 4 turns to the liturgical and spiritual aspects of the Jingjiao corpus with an emphasis on the textual format, which, as argued, affects the perception of ideas and concepts. Chapter 5 looks at how the Jingjiao community in Tang China made use of these texts related to those doctrines and practices. In other words, it is concerned with how the Jingjiao corpus as an organic whole became an integral part of the religious life in the living community. In doing so, the last chapter underscores the material bodies or mediums of those texts (stone and paper) in Tang China and further portrays the ‘bodily’ interactions between the embodied texts and the human bodies that use them. As such, this study suggests diverse ways of reading or seeing the Jingjiao corpus as a body of translated materials: textual content, textual format, and mediums of texts.

This thesis aims to portray the theological landscape in the Tang Chinese context, which differs from the European and modern Chinese contexts. Moreover, as a concrete, Chinese example, the Jingjiao translation enables us to glimpse all sorts of continuities and discontinuities in the history of translating Christianity in the world Christian context, since translation has been recognised as an ‘impulse’ that drives Christian history forward.