Jesus in Asia
By RS Sugirtharajah Harvard University Press, 311pp, £21.95/$30
The quest for the historical Jesus has been an obsession of Western scholarship since the 19th century. Judging from RS Sugirtharajah’s splendid new book, it would seem that writers and thinkers in Asia beat the West to the punch by many centuries.
Attempts to interpret Jesus’s life did not follow the rules and regulations later developed in Europe and America. There was none of the “heavy artillery of historical criticism”. This, Sugirtharajah suggests, is one reason why this particular tradition has been largely ignored.
Instead, the “re-imaginings” of Jesus’s story were put to diverse cultural uses – all the way from 7th-century China to Mughal India and beyond. Sugirtharajah takes a close look at the attempts of missionaries to portray a Jesus who would appeal to local tastes. We learn a great deal here about the life of Jesus written by the Jesuit Jerome Xavier for the emperor Akbar in the early 17th century. Accommodationism – the effort to make the Christian story acceptable to the prevailing culture – is in evidence, but Xavier still “played it safe”.
Homegrown Asian accounts were much bolder: tropes from Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism were placed front and centre. Jesus could emerge as the perfect guru, the ideal of Hindu manhood or even (during the 19th-century Taiping Rebellion) a rather ferocious character who killed off demons or those who failed to live up to required ethical standards. All of this embodied a “rejection of the notion that only the West can provide the pathways to understanding Jesus”. It was a nifty way of undermining colonial intrusion.
Asian analysis was not always positive. Some scholars embraced the concept that Jesus was a fiction – an amalgam of mythologies who demonstrated just how silly the West could be. Others preferred the idea of a humanistic Jesus – a great guy, to be sure, but far from being divine.
It is unlikely that you will approve of most of these re-castings of Jesus, but they make for a fascinating, half-forgotten intellectual journey which is brought fully to life by Sugirtharajah’s painstaking “excavations of Asian resources”.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.