Sugirtharajah - Jesus in Asia

E xisting books on the historical Jesus fall into two categories. The first, made up of works written largely from a Western perspective and giving the impression that the search for the historical Jesus is a Western enterprise, effectively began with the publication of Albert Schweitzers The Quest of the Historical Jesus. The second comprises histories written outside of Europe, especially in far-flung outposts like India, China, Korea, and Japan. These situationally based articulations were dismissed by Western scholars as culture-specific, gender and racially biased, and confessional and mission-oriented. Here I offer a different perspective that not only expands the one-sided picture of the Western search to include Asian re-imaginings of Jesuss life, but also situates the quest for the historical Jesus beyond the narrow confines of the Western world.

Few of the Asian thinkers studied here wrote a full-blown account of Jesus, nor were they seriously involved in a search marked by mainly historical questions. They did not approach the text with the heavy artillery of historical criticism, though some of them were familiar with it. Nor did they use the well-tested criteria that Western scholars routinely employ to assess the accuracy of the stories and sayings of Jesus, such as multiple corroboration, criterion of dissimilarity, criterion of coherence, or criterion of multiple attestation. Instead what they often used was an unspoken criterioncontinental self-referencean intentional, deliberate, and dignified method of self-discovery and decolonization in the face of colonial degradation. Asia was their anchoring point for the correction or removal of the Wests negative perception of indigenous culture. They unearthed and rediscovered Asias spiritual treasures as an anti-colonial strategy, approving some for their own purposes and rejecting others. They reflectively used the continents cultural resources, at times essentializing them as an instrument of mediation and thus declining to recognize the inferior role assigned to them by some missionaries and orientalists. Their articulations can be seen as a notable early attempt at provincializing Europe and a rejection of the notion that only the West can provide the pathways to understanding Jesus. These Asian thinkers demanded a different foundation for faith than history, logic, and neutrality.

Sadly, some of these thinkers have been forgotten, although they were influential in their time. While they showed familiarity with Western scholarship, wrote in English, and published with reputable publishers in colonial India and abroad, there were no attempts by the historical Jesus practitioners in the West to interact with them. The Asian voices under discussion here never made it into the Western discourse. Thakur Kahan Chandra Varmas book, for example, despite going through twelve editions, and Francis Kingsburys Jesus books, which had two revisions and a completely rewritten Tamil version, were ignored by Western biblical commentators. Ponnambalam Ramanathans commentaries attracted so much attention in America that he was hailed as the new Vivekananda, who had become famous after the 1893 Parliament of the World Religions in Chicago, but again, there was no response from the practitioners. It is likely that some of them, such as Ahn Byung Mu or Shsaku End , might have figured in the globalization classes of U.S. seminaries. What is more disappointing is that even now these thinkers and their works are rarely discussed in Asian theological seminaries, nor do they feature in their syllabi. Even on the rare occasions when they and their work are considered, it is not in Christological classes but in Mission Studies, or the History of Religions. These thinkers were not part of the academy but effective public intellectuals who knew how to explain a complicated figure to their home audiences. They described their search for the historical Jesus in a language that made it easily readable and approachable for the indigenous Anglophone world. Yet in their attempts to articulate and textualize for both local and foreign audiences, regretfully they were not taken seriously by either constituency. My hope is that this volume will rectify this oversight, drawing the interest of the present generation of scholars and other readers, even though their questions and constructions may sound dated and stale. These marginalized biographies of Jesus need to be incorporated into mainstream history, in part to prove that they were not mere historical curiosities. These articulations establish that Jesus is not the private property of Western scholarship or the institutional churches. They represent a different approach to the Western iconic Jesus that is at times illuminating and imaginative, although also sometimes infuriating and insulting. In short, their representations of Jesus demonstrate that Asian Christological thinking has been engaged creatively both with its own past and with the intellectual and Christological thinking of the broader world.

Well religions. These texts make it clear that they are not overly burdened with the historical questions that preoccupied the later Western quest for the historical Jesus but focus more on imaginative narrative representation. Regrettably, both the Chinese and Portuguese portrayals remained remote and elitist, and it took another two centuries before Jesus became accessible to ordinary Asians.

The not the sole guide to determining who this figure was.

The first modern biblical commentary in Asia was produced not by a Christian but by the Hindu Ponnambalam Ramanathan, an aristocratic and erudite Sri Lankan. does not usher in the Davidic messianic kingdom, or offer political redemption. Ramanathans Jesus is restrictive in that his message is not available universally but only to a select few who are spiritually ripe to receive such divine communication.

The Jesus Myth movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the West had its ardent followers in Asia. own. As we will see, they distort the cherished Christian image and come up with a wayward life of Jesus in order to spite Christians and missionaries.