The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in China is composed of forty-seven essays by forty-nine contributors. About twenty of the contributors are based in mainland China, reflecting a lively community of Biblical scholars there, many based in leading universities and institutes. (See Yang Huilin's chapter on “Study of the Bible in Chinese Academia.”) The essays are thematically organized into four parts: Translation Through Versions, Expression in Literary and Religious Contexts, Interpretation and Methods of Reading, and Reception in Institutions and the Arts.
Several chapters deal with translations of the Bible (or parts of it) into classical and modern Chinese, Chinese dialects, and minority languages in China. Four chapters examine the interplay of the Bible with Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist concepts and terminology. Other contributions concern the role of the Bible in Chinese literature, including works by non-Christians such as Lu Xun and Mao Dun. The section on interpretation includes an examination of the Bible's influence on ethics in China and a study of the Bible and legal rights. (A large number of human rights lawyers in China are Protestant Christians.)
Some of the chapters overlap. Both Qu Yi and Nicolas Standaert, for example, examine seventeenth-century Jesuit illustrated versions of New Testament stories, but their approaches are different enough that their chapters complement each other. Similarly, Suee Yan Yu and Shi Hengtan both write about translations of the Bible into minority languages and their reception among ethnic minorities in China, but the subject is capacious enough to allow both contributions.
It is impossible for a short review to do justice to such a varied, multidisciplinary collection of essays. The volume could have used more rigorous copyediting. No nineteenth-century British missionaries “worked among Mongols in [the] Soviet Union [i.e. Russia]” (133). The American missionary and diplomat was John Leighton Stuart, not Stuart Leighton (154). These errors notwithstanding, the contributions are almost all well written and important contributions to the study of Christianity in China.
