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Glen L. Thompson, "Jingjiao: The Earliest Christian Church in China" (Eerdmans, 2024)
01:07:45
An interview with Glen L. Thompson
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Gl. Thompson
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Christian Heel
Hello and welcome to New Books in Syriac Studies. My name is Christian Heel and today I'm talking with Glenn Thompson about his recent book Xin the Earliest Christian Church in China, which was published by Odmans in 2024 and is the winner of the 2025 Christianity Today Award of Merit in History. The book is a narrative of the earliest firings of Christianity in China that is as brilliant, rich and engaging as as it is almost unknown to most contemporary readers. Glenn L. Thompson is Professor Emeritus of New Testament and Historical Theology at Asia Lutheran Seminary in Hong Kong. He's now retired to Milwaukee, where he researches, works with students and expands his 4th Century Christianity website. Glenn, welcome. It's great to talk to you today about this book.
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Gl. Thompson
Thank you Christian for inviting me.
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Christian Heel
So tell us a little bit about your sort of background and career leading up to the beginning of this project.
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Gl. Thompson
I was trained as a Lutheran pastor, and my first assignment upon graduation was as a missionary in Zambia. So I spent six years living there with my family and more and more doing teaching and getting very interested in the early Christian world, as I thought early Christian history and the Letters of Paul. But then I had a chance to go back and do my master's and PhD at Columbia University in their Greco Roman History program. But trying to learn as much as I could about the social, economic, religious background of the Roman Empire in the early church. And when it got time for my dissertation topic to be decided on, I was very interested in manuscript work. I ended up doing a edition, the first ever edition of the Letters of the Bishops of Rome, which, surprisingly, had never been edited from the 4th century. So to have a Lutheran doing that was a little odd, but it gave me the opportunity to travel around and really get to know the manuscript libraries in Europe and so forth. And that kind of got me away from the first century into the fourth century. And it took me about 30 years to try to escape that and get back to the first century. But after my graduation, I continued to work in statistics, et cetera. But for the most of the following years, I remained doing work for my church rather than in a university appointment. Ended up finally, in the early 2000s, becoming a history professor at a small liberal arts college. By that time, a former friend had invited me to start lecturing in Hong Kong at a small seminary. And eventually I moved to Hong Kong in 2011 and spent the last decade before retirement teaching and as an academic dean at this seminary in Hong Kong. During one of my early visits to Hong Kong, 2001, and the time I was making my first trip into mainland China, I came across a little notice, I think it was in Christianity Today about the discovery of a pagoda in southern China that was supposedly from the Tang Dynasty and belonged to a Christian organization at that time. This got me very curious, and I started doing some research. And just at that time, a book came out by a man named Martin Palmer called the Jesus Sutras. And after reading his book about this early Christianity, I was not convinced by his main arguments and his take on this church. So I just started more and more investigating this area. And it took me 20 years of investigation since I was not a China scholar as such, but it opened up a whole new world of not just Christianity in China, but the Syriac Church and how it was related to the church in China.
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Christian Heel
So I'm hearing some threads here which you kind of see in your book, an interest in mission, experience in mission, an interest in sources and sort of working with the archives, working with kind of the raw materials, but also this kind of, this desire to narrate history, to teach the sort of narrative of history. And it really feels like these things kind of come together. All those three things come together wonderfully in this book of yours.
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Gl. Thompson
Absolutely. I wrote it first and foremost for my own students in Hong Kong because I felt this was a part of their history they needed to know, and that was not being told. There had not been a good book in English on this, discounting Palmer's book since the 1950s, and that was written by a Japanese scholar. So it really was time that the subject was revisited and I thought I could do it from a fairly objective position and just try to tell the. The story of what had happened here.
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Christian Heel
So it sounds like you're both teaching this story and starting to kind of engage with the academic community, doing individual articles, kind of building up towards it.
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Gl. Thompson
Yes. I was deeply indebted to a whole group of scholars, much more advanced than I am, who are working on different aspects of this story and who came together every three or four years at conferences sponsored by the University of Salzburg. And this put me in touch with Syriac scholars, Chinese scholars, Buddhist scholars and archeologists. The story is part of a larger story of Christianity along the Silk Road and in central China. And getting to know these men and their work is what really gave me confidence to finally put something on paper myself.
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Christian Heel
Oh, that's fantastic. Let's step back a little bit because we want to get to the beginning of that story as kind of Christianity spreads along the Silk Road. But step back a little bit to describe the kind of the world of Christianity that the kind of context of Christianity that's spreading there, this eastward spread.
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Gl. Thompson
Well, we in the west have, for better or for worse, been heavily influenced by the Church historian Eusebius, who as we all know, is the father of Church history and wrote this remarkable book in the early 4th century. However, on his book only really described the expansion of the Church to the west through the Greek world and then to a much less extent, actually even the Latin speaking world. But he said very little about what was happening to the East. But at the very same time as Christianity was spreading through the Roman Empire, it was spreading to the east through the perspective Persian Empire, what became the Sasanian Empire. And there it was happening in the Syriac language, which became the liturgical language of this Church. Unfortunately, in the early 5th century, that church started drifting away from the Greek and Latin Church, partly because of the political animosity between the Sasanians and the Romans and the Byzantines and partly because of other factors. But the Syriac Church continued on its own and it was an amazing mission church. We know of stories of the expansion down through the Persian Gulf to India probably already in the second century, if not the first century. And by the time that we have the rise of Islam, I believe the Christianity was probably the dominant mine or the largest of the minority religions in the area. There was no dominant religion, just a lot of smaller religions. And Christianity was probably the largest of these until the rise of Islam. And we can trace the history of the expansion of this church along the Silk Road by 410 we have bishops and metropolitans in places like Nishapur, shortly thereafter in Merv Herat. Balk. Not names known to most of us in the west, but very important places along the Silk Road. Silk Road itself was a network of roads that had been used already by the 1st century AD but was increasingly used during the 4th, 5th century. And finally by the early 7th century this spread of Christianity had made it all the way into China.
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Christian Heel
That's where this story really kind of gets started, I think your story. But it's fascinating to see the Syriac Church already sort of before 635 where the first date that we have for the beginning of the spread into China already kind of really well established with metropolitans and bishoprics and cities, monasteries, schools all throughout this area. This was a lively and flourishing kind of Christian. Christian church or branch of the Christian Church.
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Gl. Thompson
Yes, very vibrant, very mission minded. And it continued to spread despite recurring problems because war was taking place in much of this time in Central Asia along the Silk Road. And so we often hear of a bishopric that's established and then is destroyed or goes dormant for a bit and then a new set of missionaries come along and re establish it again and just was hard work but they were very, very patient and very, very dedicated to keep it going.
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Christian Heel
What sort of distances are we looking at? Just so I have a. You have great maps at the back of your book which kind of give us. And we just keep going further and further away from what we think of as the kind of the beginnings of Christianity.
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Gl. Thompson
Yeah, several thousand miles. We're talking about between the Middle East. The Church of the east had its headquarters in Seleucia Ctesiphon, near Babylon or Baghdad, near modern Baghdad. And that was pretty much where the bishops and the archbishops came from. They were almost always created from homegrown people in Iraq and then sent out. So it was often several thousand miles that they traveled to get out there.
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Christian Heel
So before we start looking at some of the kind of sources which tell us this story, I think it's perhaps useful to just give a brief kind of overview of what the history of Christianity in China that comes from those sources. So perhaps begin with Christianity under the Tang Dynasty. What do we know about it and kind of what does it look like? And then perhaps moving forward.
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Gl. Thompson
Yes. One of our sources, the Shi' an stele, which we will talk about, I'm sure in more detail, gives us a very Precise date of 635 when a group of missionaries arrived at the Tang Dynasty court. Interestingly enough, we're told that the most famous prime minister of the era came out to greet them. So this is an indication that they did not come on their own. They were probably part of an official government embassy coming from the Sasanian government, and that this had probably been prearranged or pre approved. My theory is that Christians from the Sasanian empire had moved in and were residing in the hang capital, traders, business people, and that they had actually sent a request back the church headquarters saying, send us bishops, we need priests to baptize our children, et cetera. And so that this first came as a kind of an immigrant request. We're told that when they arrived, they were greeted, their books were taken for examination and translation, and three years later they were. An official edict was promulgated that gave them permission to spread their teaching in in the country, throughout the country. We have similar documents about the Zoroastrian and Manichean religions. Who also were the three of these made up, the three foreign religions or the three Persian religions that came into China. And they were all officially approved, but only Christianity was approved to be spread everywhere among all people. The others were given permission to serve, set up operation for their own immigrant communities, but no further. So Christianity was given a little wider birth. And on the seele, which was set up in 781, 150 years afterwards, it basically runs through Chinese history, telling us the names of half a dozen of the subsequent emperors and how these men had all allowed the Christian presence, how the church continued to expand under their gracious rule. And then from this steely, it seems like things are really going very well by 781 when the steely is erected.
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Gl. Thompson
However, about 50 years later, an emperor came along who had a financial crisis on his hands. By that time, Buddhism had really taken off in China and spread exponentially. And in the Buddhist world, virtually anybody could decide to become a priest or a nun. People could designate their land for Buddhist use and that would automatically get them off the tax rolls, both their land and the people. And so there were so many people doing this that the emperor in 845 issued a decree saying all the foreign religions are going to be reined in. All of these clergy are to return to secular life. And it was aimed specifically at the Buddhists. But the other foreign religions were kind of caught in the crossfire. And the Buddhist lobby was so strong that it was overturned within a couple years for the Buddhists. But the original edict that included the other foreign religions was not overturned. And so shortly after 845, this first flowering of Christianity in China again comes to an end, at least historically speaking. How it went underground, how long it continued, we don't know. But from the historical record it disappears. Then shortly after 845, then it almost reemerges almost immediately up in northwestern China. This during the Tang period. It was specifically in the capital cities of Xi', An, Chang' an at the time, and Luoyang, the eastern capital, and a few other major cities where we know there was a Christian presence. But at the same time the Syriac missionaries continued along the Silk Road. And starting about nine in the 9th 10th centuries, large numbers of various Turkic tribes that were located along the northern and northwestern edges of China started being converted to Christianity. And so we have groups like the Terites and the Naaman and the Merkit, none of which we remember today very much the Angut, but also the Uyghurs for example, who are in the news. Again, all of these tribes became partially Christianized. And eventually when Genghis Khan united them all under his rule, he intermarried his family with these leaders from these different groups. And Genghis Khan had sons who were married to Christian wives from this group. And Christianity again emerges at this time. And when one of his grandsons takes over in China, as the larger Mongol Empire kind of comes into pieces, we have him establishing the Yuan Dynasty, the so called Mongol Dynasty in China. And we find Christians again across China. During the Tang Dynasty, they called themselves the Jingzhou, the luminous religion or their luminous teaching. Under the Yuan Dynasty, they had a different name. They were called the Yelekouen Zhao. Unfortunately, nobody really knows what Yelokun refers to or what its meaning is. Zhao again is religion. But in Chinese sources we know that the Yelokun Jiao were quite numerous throughout China during this period, and again, quite important. But once the Yuan dynasty fell in 1375, again Christianity seems to disappear. So many of the Christians seem to have been associated with the dynasty that the local Han people again, were not quite as prolific among the Christian population. And again, they seem to disappear from history for several hundred years after that, until the arrival of the Jesuits into the 16th century, when again, we see a Christian presence.
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Christian Heel
That's probably a good point to sort of bring up the Shi' an stele, because this sort of next wave of Christians and the discovery of that Sidi kind of, you know, intersect. So we have, I mean, it's kind of a fascinating confluence of kind of ancient history and a new Christian mission coming together, which is, you know, kind of a great story. So perhaps you could tell us a bit about the discovery of that stelie and then, you know, a little bit more about, because it is a, a really interesting text and it feels as though we've really only come to kind of understand it properly in the last half century, really.
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Gl. Thompson
Yes, the Jesuits started trying to get into China in the late 16th century and only succeeded in the early 17th century. They had heard stories about the Catholic missionaries who had gone to the Mongol courts and everything and who had reported finding all of these Yellowkoen Syriac speaking congregations all over China. Marco Polo had found them all over China. So when the Jesuits got there, they started looking around and really tried to find if there were any remnants and were quite disappointed that they could find nothing. But then suddenly, around 1625, some workmen near Xi' an uncovered this buried stele. It's 10ft high, weighs several tons, has some 1800 Chinese characters beautifully inscribed on it in very elegant Tang Dynasty grip, but along the edges also this strange Syriac script. And this came to the notice of one of the local scholars who, who had a friend who had become a Christian with the Jesuits, sent a copy onto them. And so very soon the Jesuits found out about this, went to see it, and they took news of it back to Europe. And it created quite an interest back there. And actually this text becomes one of the great impetuses for the creation of Western synology, the interest that it created at that time. And so that's how. How it was discovered. And the Jesuits used it to say, look, this, we are not anything new here. Christianity existed before. So they tried to convince the Chinese government to allow them to stay and function partly on the basis, again, of the stele and what it had to say about earlier forms of Christianity. How do you argue against a religion that had been approved by numerous Tang Dynasty emperors, some of the most famous ones. So what does the text say? The text is made up of two parts, a poem and what I call the commentary. So it's 33 lines of text, and the first two our kind of introduction, and the final one a conclusion. But the middle 30 columns are made up of a concluding poem, which is in the last part of the actual stele text, and then before it a commentary. The poem, I argue, is written first. Chinese poetry, very, very precise in how it's written. There are the characters, four line, four characters per line, and eight lines about each one of the different emperors, except for the emperor who first was there when the Jingzhou came in. He gets 10 lines because they have to mention the arrival of the Jingzhou. And so very short, very, very concise lines that in classical Chinese, leads most things to the interpretation of the reader. It's very, very ambiguous. And so if you look at several online translations of the stele, you'll see great divergencies in the interpretation which. But especially with the poetry, this is true of all Chinese poetry, and Tang Dynasty is famous for its poetry. So very, very short, very vague, very eulogistic of each emperor, but it says a few nice things about the emperor and then says, and he supported our church very well, gave this honor to the church, sent some of his calligraphy to be displayed in our churches, things like this. Then if you go back to the longer commentary, you'll see it's arranged in exactly the same order, but for each one of these, he'll give a lot more interpretation about exactly what was happening. So, for instance, under One of them, it says, when the pure, bright, luminous teaching was introduced to our Tang Kingdom, its scriptures were translated and temples were built. That's in the poem. In the commentary, it mentions Alopen, the head missionary who observed the heavens and carried the true scriptures. Here, after his scriptures were translated in the royal library, the palace officials investigated their teaching. Alubin, the virtuous man, has brought scriptures and images from afar and offered them at the capitol, actually quoting from the edict, Imperial edict that allowed Christianity to come up. So the commentary just expands on this very beautiful poem, and it gives us more details about what happened.
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Christian Heel
This is one of the things that you get from kind of reading through your. Your work on this is a clear sense that this is both a Christian text and a Chinese text. And you can't really understand it just as a Christian text. You really have to understand it as a Chinese text.
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Gl. Thompson
Chinese text as well. Yes. And as I said, most of what is in my book is due to the wonderful scholarship of my contemporaries. But a few things that I tried to contribute from my background. One is to come up with a way to cite the text by chapter and verse, if you will. Sam Liu, one of the other scholars in this area, already had suggested that we go back to using the column numbers to help this. But then I said also that what we need to do is to divide each column down into its constituent parts, the sense units. So in my book, I can give a column number, dot, and then the sense unit number within that column. And this way, for the first time, when you're reading and comparing text, you can actually make sure you're talking about the same words in this, as I say, quite ambiguous text sometimes. And then the second thing I did was try to introduce some of our Western concepts of textual criticism so that there actually was no text that really talked about the variant possibilities and how different people read different characters on the text. And then thirdly, I tried to emphasize this fact that the stele had to have been approved by the government before it was erected. This was such a public text being put up in a public text on a huge stele like this. And the fact that it mentioned all of these emperors and talked about them, this is not something anybody in China would have been allowed to do without having this run through the censors first. So the Christian man who composed this, who was a man who became one of the bishops of China, Jing. Jing as his Chinese name, Adam, his Syriac name, he had to compose this in a way that it would really resonate or at least get through the censors and give a fair history of the Jingzhou and its teaching, because several of the columns summarized Christian teaching. And then this was erected probably out front on the main street, right in front of the church, the main church in Xi'. An. So the passersby, who were not Christians had to be able to read this. It had to be phrased in a way that would not totally upset the Buddhists and the Daoists in town, and that would not upset any of the imperial officials. And yet it had to be honest as a Christian text as well, because it states very clearly that it was also approved by the powers that be and tell the story of the arrival. So it needs to be read from both angles. And there are lines that are again, ambiguous in a classical Chinese text sense. But this is probably intentional, so that it could be read either way in a way that would be honest in either context, if you will.
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Christian Heel
The other sort of major discovery that I think sort of seems to open up a sense of the Christianity in kind of Chinese culture are the documents that come from the Dunhuang discoveries. And this collection. And this discovery really kind of, I think, pushes forward, seems to me, the kind of understanding of Christianity during this kind of time period. So perhaps you could introduce us to that and work that it does.
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Gl. Thompson
Yes. And this. These texts are especially important because of this dual nature of the stele text. We can't. It was not a catechetical text or anything like that. So we should. Before we had these other texts, that was all we knew about the church. And some of the conclusions, therefore, were erroneous. But about shortly after 1900, a place, a room, a side room in one of the cave at Dunhuang was discovered. Now, Dunhuang is a oasis town just before you enter the Taklamakan Desert, if you're heading westward in northwestern China, there is a series of caves along a riverbank. It's now a World Heritage Site, very much worth a visit. And this was kind of the last civilized outposts before you crossed the desert and headed into Central Asia. And many Buddhist pilgrims would stop there and give their offerings for a safe trip. Ones on the return trip would give their thank offerings there as well. So these, a series of caves there were carved out along the riverbank. I think there's 80 or 100 of them just filled with Buddhist art over centuries and centuries of occupation. But by the early 20th century, there was only one monk left in the whole area who felt it was his kind of obligation to keep the place under Surveillance and keep the. The dream alive, if you will. At the same time, we had Westerners coming in for the first time traveling through this area, looking for identifying ancient historical places, doing some primitive archaeology, etc. And this one monk at one point discovers this side room behind one of the altars in one of these caves that had been sealed around the shortly after the year 1000. And when he opened it up, he found it filled from floor to ceiling with manuscripts, tens of thousands of manuscripts. And the first people to come through there got wind of this, the first Westerners. And after making some monetary donations to the local monk to help him rehabilitate some of the local areas, they carried off cartloads of manuscripts, some back to the British Museum, a whole series. Paul Paliot took a whole series back to the Bibliotheque Nationale. And then finally the Chinese authorities caught on and got most of the rest of them back to Beijing. But they got spread all over and 95, 98% of them were Buddhist manuscripts. Many multiple copies of some of the most common Buddhist sutras. But other works were included there, and it came out that a number of them were Christian, very small number. Paul Peot took one back to the Bibliotheconacional that was a liturgical manuscript. It had a Western version or a Chinese version of the Gloria in Excelsis that is used in liturgical formats in most of the other ancient churches. And then a number of other manuscripts ended up in the hands of collectors, mostly Japanese collectors, and then they disappeared. Before they disappeared, we got preliminary translations and a few grainy photographs came into the hands of a couple of the scholars working on this. Peter Saiki, this Japanese scholar, edited some of them. AC Mool, the English scholar who also wrote a book on Christianity in China before 1550 that was published in the 1930s, I believe. So they knew about these. They had got some preliminary translations and texts, but then they disappeared and nobody could really study these anymore. And then suddenly, about 10, 15 years ago, they reappeared, almost all of them in a collection in Japan, in Kyoto, and they went on display. And suddenly again, we have now high quality pictures of most of these, and some scholars have been allowed to go and visit them. I have not had that privilege, but I had the beautiful pictures that we have from them. So suddenly these texts again can be studied in detail. Unfortunately, we don't know what they were for. Again, they're quite a variety of texts. One is called the Book of the Lord Messiah, though the title was a bit corrupted apparently, and so nobody's quite sure how it should be properly translated, but it gives a nice summary of Christian teaching in various ways. We have a text called On Almsgiving that begins with kind of a retelling of the Sermon on the Mount, including the part about giving alms, which is where it got its name, apparently. We have a book called the Parable, a shorter one that's full of parabolic sayings, quite Chinese, but with Christian resonances throughout it. And then we have one or two that are even more difficult to interpret. A book on the mystery and blessedness, and another one that was often called the Book On Origin of Origins, that really are so full of Buddhist and Taoist theology or theological terms that it's a little bit difficult to know what their purpose was. And however, even that book says very clearly three times. Only the Jing Zhao has this wonderful teaching. Only the Jingzhou teaching can bring one to salvation. So these texts give us a much clearer picture of the attempts to enculturate the Christian message into Chinese. They're all in various forms of classical Chinese, and yet some obviously were used for catechetical purposes. I've already mentioned the liturgical ones, and some seem to be maybe some sort of attempt to dialogue with existing Buddhists and Taoists and get them to consider this new teaching. But it was these more strange ones that allowed Martin Palmer to describe the Jingzhou as a form of Taoist Christianity. But my own interpretation, having myself served as a missionary, is that missionaries always start by using the vocabulary known to the people and then redefining it and using that to describe the Christian message. It's always a challenge, however, to make sure that one stays within the rule of faith. The Christian teaching, while one does that and doesn't start crossing the line into syncretism. And it could well be that these two documents were really very much on the edge or over the edge on that in their attempt to do this. The other documents quite clearly, however, show that, you know, the Christian teaching is still at the scent. And everything from the Incarnation to the vicarious atonement of Christ are spelled out in the documents to show that there was an orthodox theology behind this.
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Christian Heel
So these are not just sort of contributing to our understanding of the eastward spread of all the nature of, I suppose, Christianity within that region, but also to this kind of broader question of the kind of history of missions and how the Christian message is finds purchase in a highly sophisticated sort of ancient culture with its own traditions, with a kind of a dominant religious within the dominant religious context. I mean, it's really kind of Fascinating from that perspective.
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Gl. Thompson
Absolutely. And it's one of our better case studies, if you will, of this kind of thing where we have a very long established culture that bet very proud, very sophisticated, and yet Christianity comes in and trying to use the literary forms, et cetera, but to present its message, the connection with the ongoing connection with the Church of the East. We know from the stele and from the other documents that there was a regular reinforcements sent from the east or from the Church of the east headquarters to China. And then we have this remarkable story how in the Yuan Dynasty, one of the monks from China ends up getting elected Patriarch of the Church to the East. So we have plenty of entities indications that the structure that they preserve, the exact same ecclesiastical structure as the Church of East, all of these tell us that there was a close connection. Despite the 2,000 mile distance, they maintained this connection. And so it was highly unlikely that this church would be allowed to kind of go off the rails and do its own thing. But at the same time, the documents show us very clearly that there was a serious, serious attempt to enculturate it and make sure the message was getting across. How successful they were in this, of course, is another question. And it does seem that the Syriac leadership, the use of Syriac language, et cetera and other names and so forth, lead us to believe that the percentage of Christians that were actually Han Christians rather than expatriates were at least among the leadership, never really gained purchase at this time.
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Christian Heel
Yeah, that's really fascinating. And another part of this is back in the sort of the home church. I mean, Christianity in the Middle east in this sort of 9th 10th century or the 8th, 9th, 10th century is incredibly sort of intellectually vigorous. I mean, there's a lot of schools going on translation work in science and philosophy and medicine. And this was a sort of a, you know, and they're starting to engage with Hannab Islam in really kind of interesting ways. So this is an extension of a really interesting narrative that the cultural contact that the Church of East is having with kind of other within themselves as they're sort of developing their own kind of intellectual culture and with other kind of religions is really the other sort of source that you introduce us to is the Turfan manuscripts. And perhaps I think my only encounter with these is sort of indirectly, I suppose, knowing scholars who are working on them. But one of my early teachers of Syriac was Nicholas Sims Williams, who works on salty and things, and he is a phenomenal scholar who seems to have learned Syriac because some of these texts contain Sogdian translations of Syriac materials. But tell us a bit more about Turfan and kind of what's there.
- [47:16]
Gl. Thompson
Yes, Turfan is another one of the oasis cities up in the northwest part of China. Turofan in Chinese. And again, early in the 20th century, some manuscripts were discovered there in what was clearly the remains of a monastery or monastic complex. And at the last Salzburg conference, actually in Samarkand several years ago, and I spent a day touring Samarkand with Nicholas at that point, because he's one of my mentors in this area as well. But in that, we were told that they are now excavating the monastery again and that hundreds of additional manuscripts have since been discovered. So keep your eyes open for even more Turfan material. But hundreds of manuscripts and sections of manuscripts were found at Turfan, and these have now been published over the years, and much of that can be seen online. And the really amazing thing is how multicultural it was. So Sogdian you may have brought up, the Sogdians were this people who lived in Central Asia and for many years were kind of the middlemen between the Persian Empire and the Sasanian Empire and later the Islamic Empire and China. And the Sogdians were the people who often took the goods from one side to the other as middlemen. And Sogdian became one of the lingua franca of this area. And Syriac, the Syriac missionaries, and Syriac actually provided the script for Sogdian and for most of the other Central Asian languages that came into being. So at Turfan, we find this amazing multiculturalism, where I think they found about 15 different languages in the Turfan manuscripts in about as many different scripts. So you often find a old Turkic text written in Sogdian, a Sogdian text written in Chinese, and this kind of interaction and, you know, many sections of liturgical writings, et cetera from this. But it shows that you had an incredible mix of peoples in this part of the world. And the Jingzhou and then the later Yellowku and Zhao were just one. The Chinese interpretations of this and incarnations of this broader, Syriac speaking Christianity. Yeah, I might just add here, it might be a good place to add that one of the reasons for writing this book, again, was to kind of set the record straight also about that this was a real Christian church. Right after the discovery when the Syriac was seen on there. Very quickly, this early church was labeled as Nestorian. And in Western texts, right up until today, the Qing Zhao is still often referred to as the Nestorian Church in China. And as you know, that name was given to the Church of the east in general as a convenient shorthand, but also as a derogatory name. And so nothing in our texts in China would in any way show that there were any Nestorian Christology that, you know, should be attached to these forms of Christianity. And as you know, Sebastian Braque has written on this too, that this is actually a misnomer for the entire Church of the East. But this was one reason why the Jingzhou hasn't been studied more detailed in the last hundred years or so, even by Christian missiology and Christian scholars. So often they just dismissed it as a heretical group and not worthy of study. And so again, and this carried over to the Chinese Christians who had very little interest in this for the same reason. So that has started to be overcome. Finally, we still see the name Nestorian attached too often to. To different things regarding the Jing Jiao. But Chinese Christians themselves have now started taking a much stronger interest. And we have a whole group of young Chinese scholars, Christian scholars, who are investigating this church. And I think that's one of the great benefits of, you know, writing on this subject and being part of that correction.
- [52:28]
Christian Heel
That's really nice. And perhaps in the last part of this, our conversation be interesting to kind of turn to this question of both, I suppose, a growing awareness among kind of Western scholars of this remarkable.
- [52:48]
Gl. Thompson
Story.
- [52:48]
Christian Heel
Of the eastward spread of Christianity and just the sheer scale of what we're talking about and this kind of embrace, I suppose, this seemingly fairly recent embrace of this early story among kind of Chinese Christians and kind of some of the obstacles. So you seem to have both sort of systemic obstacles to this. And you've kind of mentioned the kind of Nestorian connection as perhaps one of them for the Chinese, but also these things which attract people to this region. And certainly when I think of my colleagues who work in this area, one of the things that attracts them is this sort of just the sheer linguistic abundance and the kind of cultural abundance. They're the kind of scholars who can't resist the idea of a corpus of text in multiple languages covering multiple regions, and that requires multiple modern languages to even be able to engage with it. So talk a little bit about both these two sides, I suppose, of, of a kind of a growing Western appreciation of this, but also a growing kind of Chinese appreciation of this, of this history.
- [54:02]
Gl. Thompson
Yes, well, as you know, Christian, the, the whole study of Syriac Church and the Syriac language has just mushroomed in the last 50 years. I think that's partly due to the, the emigres who have been forced out of the Middle east and settled around the world, and they're trying to reclaim their heritage, unfortunately caught in the crossfire of everything that's happened in the Middle East. But that has really given an impetus to Syriac studies in general. But as you say, the linguistic complexity of working in Chinese texts and the fact that these texts had disappeared, most of them, made it a rather elite group that was working in this area. But that is starting to change thanks to the scholarship being done. And the German scholar Max Deeg, who's resident in uk, he's put out some wonderful books on the stele and the texts in. In German. We've had Italian and French scholars who've done the same. Matteo Nicolinizzane, a good friend from these conferences, put out a book from Oxford University Press a year ago on the Luminous Way to the east that came out just before my book, which is a more scholarly examination of these same texts, giving translations to all of the illustration. And Matteo and I worked closely as we were preparing our two books, so we agreed on the same translations for key terms and titles so that they wouldn't be any more complex for the normal reader than necessary. And this is one of the things that has kind of hampered scholarship before, again, because of the nature of Chinese. The titles, even of these documents were so differently translated, it was hard to know what kind of people were talking about. So in the west, we now have a growing body of scholarship. The proceedings from the Salzburg Conferences have been a great help as well. In China, we've had the situation that, well, religious scholarship in general has not been encouraged on the mainland in the last several generations. So it's been mostly archaeologists and classical Chinese religious scholars who have attempted to look at this. We've had Christian scholars in the overseas Chinese population in Hong Kong, Taiwan and other places who have also looked at it. But now we. I think we've come to a point where this has become enough of a historical subject that even China, Chinese, mainland scholars are starting to address it in a more comprehensive way. One of my hopes for my book actually, again, is to call attention to the fact that Christianity is not a Western colonial import into China. This has confused the current Chinese government and is one of their reasons for restricting some Christian contacts and other Christian activities. And this shows very clearly that Christianity originally did not come from that direction. It did come from the west, but literally from the west, from the Middle east. And that it was successfully, you know, under several different dynasties. Christian soldiers actually helped re establish the Tang Dynasty after the An Lushan Rebellion. And this is talked about on the stele to some extent. So hoping to show again that Christians are good citizens, that there's no reason to just associate them with the colonialism and that this might also have a salutary effect on the Chinese officialdom.
- [58:39]
Christian Heel
Yeah, this is fantastic. I think that this book will do a lot of great work both, as you say, among sort of English reading, Chinese scholars and Christians, especially among kind of Christians in Europe and North America, I think will have a growing sense of both the kind of Christianity in the Middle east, but also this kind of mission and impact and effect and cultural contacts and the way that really creates a kind of a. A much richer and more interesting and more compelling story of Christianity and showing its kind of vitality in flourishing in these different kind of regions and cultures. And just how the kind of influence and importance of Syriac Christianity, this is not just a kind of a curiosity or something to make the. This Christian story a little bit more interesting. This is a sort of a vibrant part of the story that just has these long tendrils going out into all, you know, that are still being discovered. I mean, it's marvelous that this story is still emerging.
- [59:58]
Gl. Thompson
And the fact that in China, modern Christianity, Protestant Christianity in China is very much influenced by modern free church theology, Armenian theology and practices, Pentecostalism, et cetera, and the story of the Jingzhou and the eloquent Zhao point to a different type of Chinese Christianity that was highly liturgical, highly sacramental. And this has caused modern Christians to know in China to think again about, you know, what. What is the essence of Christianity and what is mere cultural trappings and, and so forth. So I think that is a positive thing as well. There's always been the, A, a bigger divide, I think, between Protestants and Catholics in China, partly because of Chinese terminology where the Chinese word for Christian really means Protestant. And then Catholic is a totally separate term. And so often Protestants don't realize that Catholic Christians in China are also Christians. And this story again brings out the fact that the liturgical, the sacramental things they associate with the Catholic Church were also part of the ancient church in general and part of the earliest parts of Catholic Christianity. And that here, for instance, this year with our celebration of the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea, this is being celebrated in the Church of the east with a symposium in September. And at the same time, if the Jingzhou still existed, they would be sending delegates to that conference. I mean, this is part of the broader ancient church. And I think that's a wonderful part of the story.
- [62:01]
Christian Heel
That's a great point to end, a great place to end. Thank you so much, Ken. It's been a great. It's been great having this conversation. And I think your book will continue to do kind of good and interesting work in attracting people to this conversation. So thank you.
- [62:16]
Gl. Thompson
My pleasure.