In Jesus in Asia, R. S. Sugirtharajah—emeritus professor at the University of Birmingham known for his scholarship on postcolonial criticism of the Bible and giving voice to marginalized voices of biblical interpretation—turns his attention to the Asian re-imaginings of Jesus's life. The book is not an attempt to evaluate Asian constructions of the life of Jesus through the lens of Christian orthodoxy, but rather seeks to unearth and situate those marginal histories within the larger purview of scholarship on Jesus. Plan to be unsettled if you are a reader coming to this book expecting orthodox moments of contextualization and a story of passive Asians uncritically adopting Western conceptual categories about Jesus. Instead what readers overhear are colonizer-colonized confrontations, challenges to orientalist binaries vis-à-vis the West, and interpretations that complicate the sharp division between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. Read about Jesus within the multi-scriptural, multi-religious historical contexts of Asia, within which the story of Jesus is made meaningful. Sugirtharajah employs primary sources that span scrolls, manuscripts, to novels penned by a wide range of Asians, some self-ascribing as Christians and others opposing that designation; some authors wrote to applaud Jesus as unique Savior, while others wrote to debunk him.
Jesus in Asia consists of nine chapters, followed by a conclusion titled, “Our Jesus, Their Jesus,” where Sugirtharajah's final statement reflects a degree of pessimism about the possibility of reconstructing a meaningful, straightforward history of Jesus in the modern era. Chapter 1 compares the first modern depiction of Jesus's life, Mirror of Holiness—written in Persian by Jerome Xavier (nephew of Francis) in religiously plural India for the Mughal Emperor Akbar—to the work of Church of the East missionaries whose Jesus Sutras sought to communicate the Gospel in China beginning in the late 630s. Both texts received a hostile reception in the West, with the Chinese Jesus Sutras deemed to be “hopeless syncretism” (32). Yet these two documents, Sugirtharajah argues, represented two models for presenting Jesus in Asia, the first an attempt to transfer the Semitic message without paying attention to the local, the second overlooking Semitic concepts of sin and human depravity and, instead, communicating Jesus through vernacular Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian categories recognizable to their audience. These two models are reflected in the remaining chapters of the book.
Chapter 2 explores the interpretation of Jesus by the Hakka Chinese revolutionary Hong Xiuquan, the leader of the Taiping Rebellion who proclaimed himself Jesus's younger brother. Hong preached a political kingdom of God on earth, replete with moral rules and military discipline. Jesus resembled a Chinese elder brother who fulfills his filial piety rather than a descendant of the Davidic dynasty. In chapter 3, Sugirtharajah explores the work of Sri Lankan Hindu Ponnambalam Ramanathan, who presented Jesus as a charismatic Hindu guru. Ramanathan emphasized Jesus as Spirit in a human body, since Jesus's body was “no better than a carcass” (69). Important was Jesus's spiritual experience, rather than his crucifixion and resurrection, for he was interpreted as an Indian jnana, an avatara that exemplified spiritual self-discovery. Chapter 4 considers the writings of Chandra Varma and Dhirendranath Chowdhuri that attacked the historicity of Jesus to argue that Jesus never existed. Their approach included exploiting inaccuracies in the historical references to Jesus's life. They saw the New Testament as a “confused mass of writings” (98), full of “mistranslations and errors” (98), and the result of early Christian mythologies.
Chapter 5 considers the Hindu convert to Christianity, C. T. Alahasundram, who was later renamed Francis Kingsbury. Kingsbury employed Western scholarship in an attempt to restore Christianity to what he believed was “most likely to be historical” (124). Kingsbury's Tamil version presented Jesus not as a divine human being but simply as a human being, with no mention of the Resurrection. Chapter 6 highlights the construction of Jesus by Manilal Parekh, who embraced Christianity while remaining committed to his Jain tradition. Parekh proffered Jesus, a Jina (conqueror of all passions), as the exemplification of the immolation of the soul for the sake of others. Parekh heavily criticized missionary churches that were “intoxicated with pride of race, cultures, creed, and empire” (144).
In chapter 7, we read about Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan's interpretation of Jesus as a model of the divine potential in each person. According to Radhakrishnan, salvation was mediated through the eternal Christ, not the historic Jesus, since Jesus was the “expression of timeless spirit” (179) like Krishna, Rama, or Buddha. Chapter 8 focuses on the interpretation of Jesus through Ahn Byung Mu's minjung theology. Ahn, a student of Bultmann and pioneer in minjung theology, presented Jesus as a “friend of Minjung” (202), that is, of the politically oppressed, uneducated, and economically exploited who stands passively with the minjung. What was important to Ahn was how the Resurrection was “realized in the community” (217). Chapter 9 concerns mostly Shusaku Endo's A Life of Jesus, which presented Jesus's weakness as his strength, a strength of the maternal Messiah Endo dressed in a kimono rather than Western clothing.
Readers with little of knowledge of Christianity would have benefitted from the author's more vigorous commentary on the quality (e.g., orthodoxy) of these Asian interpretations, even while the author seems unwilling to admit a coherent life of Jesus against which retellings could be understood. Sugirtharajah's approach is descriptive rather than interpretive. Relatedly, the author's call to include these re-imaginings into mainstream history, without constructive criticism, would seem to further obfuscate an intelligible interpretation of the life of Jesus.
These early Asian interpretations of the life of Jesus are utterly fascinating as reflections of Asian engagement with various quests for the historic Jesus as well as their own religious and philosophical contexts (e.g., he was Asiatic in race and Hindu in faith). Readers of Jesus in Asia will revisit some of the most enduring scholarly themes of history and religion. This book fills a lacuna in scholarship in biblical studies, theology, and history and is highly recommended.
