Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-rdgjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-08T20:32:19.426Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Silk Road Christians and the Translation of Culture in Tang China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 May 2017

Scott Fitzgerald Johnson
Scott Fitzgerald Johnson*
Affiliation:
University of Oklahoma
*
*University of Oklahoma, Department of Classics and Letters, Carnegie Hall, Norman, OK 73019, USA. E-mail: sfj@ou.edu.
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article attempts to analyse the famous ‘Nestorian Monument’ from Xi'an, set up in 781 by Syriac Christians, as a document of cultural translation and integration. Previous scholarship on the monument has tended to privilege either the Syriac or the Chinese sections of the inscription. By combining the two, and by making use of recent advances in the study of Syriac Christians along the Silk Road, this article argues that the Syriac Christians who set up the monument were using their long history, extending from Persia to China, as a means of establishing their community publicly in new political circumstances of China in the 780s. The role of Syriac on this monument was twofold: it signalled to the local Syriac-speaking community their fundamental ties to the world of Persian and central Asian Christianity, while it also allowed, through ideological and linguistic interaction with Chinese, the maintenance of a Syriac Christian identity through the process of translation. The language of Syriac therefore provides the background of a community looking both backward and forward in a foreign, changing cultural environment.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 53: TRANSLATING CHRISTIANITY , June 2017 , pp. 15 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2017 

Introduction

In an article entitled ‘Ways to Go and Not Go in the Contextualisation of the Jingjiao Documents of the Tang Period’, historian of premodern China Max Deeg makes a provocative statement that may not seem so provocative on the surface: ‘No Chinese Jingjiao text [i.e. text in Chinese written by Christians] . . . has a direct parallel in Syriac or another relevant – let us say Central Asian – language in which Nestorian texts are preserved.’Footnote 1 I would like to take this quotation as a starting point. Deeg here is talking about Jingjiao, the so-called ‘Luminous Religion’ in Chinese, the name that East Syriac Christians adopted in trying to communicate their beliefs within a culture very foreign to their own. There is, however, no single word expressing ‘religion’ in Chinese, and the word jiao is often translated simply as ‘teaching’. When coupled with jing (‘the luminous’) the translation of this key term is perhaps better rendered as ‘the teaching of/about the luminous’, in parallel to daojiao, ‘the teaching of/about the Dao’, or fojiao, ‘the teaching of/about the Buddha’.Footnote 2 The question then becomes: what is ‘the luminous’ and how does it relate to Christianity? To put it more theoretically, almost immediately in this discussion the issue of transmission and intercultural exchange can be seen as a problem of definitions and essentials, and equally a problem of self-definition and self-expression in non-native environments.

Each of the proper names in Deeg's statement – Chinese, Jingjiao, Christian, Syriac, central Asian, Nestorian – will be discussed in what follows, although it should be emphasized that each is a world unto itself and cannot be fully debated here.Footnote 3 Nevertheless, I hope that by focusing on definitions and the debates surrounding them the question of the limits of cultural transmission can come to the fore. In a volume devoted to translation as an activity of the Church writ large, the complexity of acculturation is primary, and the degree to which historical cultures are bound by modern preconceptions of their essentials should be made as transparent as possible. This is especially true given the incredible amount of cultural exchange and cross-pollination that went on in Late Antiquity. I would argue that it is imperative for historians to find ways for the cultures of the Silk Road and China to maintain their ability to self-define in new and creative ways. The East Syriac Christians crossed so many seemingly unbridgeable boundaries (at least from the historian's perspective), and so much emphasis has been placed on their arrival in Chang'an in the seventh century, that it will be valuable to reconsider our foundational definitions of the people-groups involved, with special attention to the language and ideas they used to define themselves.

The example I will use to discuss these themes is that of Syriac Christianity. This subject is, of course, topical: a significant number of the refugees from Syria and Iraq presently seeking refuge in Europe and elsewhere are Christians. Of the Christians amongst these refugees, nearly all can claim, in one way or another, the language of Syriac as part of their inheritance, even if today their liturgies are celebrated in Arabic. My goal in this article is to discuss one episode from the heritage of Syriac Christianity. In particular, I will consider the arrival of Syriac Christians in Tang China. I am especially interested in how the Christians themselves thought of that arrival and how they translated their cultural and religious world into a Chinese milieu. What did they retain from where they had been before? Were they integrated into the culture? What role did linguistic translation play in that integration? I shall consider Syriac as a ‘cultural actor’ in its own right or as having a ‘social presence’ in the cultures in which it was used and spoken, particularly in its role as the medium of translation. Some necessary background will be given at the beginning to situate the Syriac language and the significance of Syriac Christians’ presence in China. It is hoped that, despite the specificity of the evidence presented below, the example of Christianity in Tang China will offer avenues for the exploration of the role of translation in the history of the Church in other times and places.

Syriac, Empire and Translation

Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic, which was the imperial language of ancient Assyria in the first millennium BCE and which, during the Roman Empire, was the main language spoken by Jews in the provinces of Judea and Palestine, including Jesus himself. Syriac was originally simply the version of Aramaic spoken in the city of Edessa (modern Urfa in south-eastern Turkey). Edessa had been founded by the successors of Alexander the Great in the region, the Seleucids. From the second century BCE to the third century CE, Edessa remained an independent city-state ruled primarily by the Abgarid dynasty. Only in 213 CE did it come under direct Roman rule, having been made a colony by Septimius Severus. Coincident with becoming a Roman colony, Edessa was also Christianized, though via a different vector because the Roman Empire was not Christian at this point. One early legend, known to the earliest Church historian, Eusebius of Caesarea, recounted that Edessa's king Abgar had corresponded with Jesus and been healed by his disciples.Footnote 4 For these reasons, both legendary and not, Syriac claims an early and venerable Christian tradition in northern Mesopotamia and Roman Syria.

It is all the more surprising, therefore, that, despite its deep roots in the Hellenistic, Near Eastern and Roman cultural spheres, Syriac never became either an imperial language or a language of power and law (Rechtssprache). During the period during when Edessa was under the Roman Empire (later the Byzantine Empire, ruled from Constantinople), Syriac was a subaltern language distinctive of a group on the margins of imperial power and influence. Nonetheless, it was a vibrant and valuable language for many groups. In linguistic terms it was both a ‘vehicular’ language, in the sense that Syriac was used as a translation language via which texts were mediated from Greek into Semitic and other languages (e.g. Armenian and Georgian), and also a ‘prestige’ language, in the sense that texts which had originally been produced in Syriac were sought after by speakers of Greek and other languages and consequently translated into those languages.Footnote 5 Culturally speaking, from Late Antiquity to today Syriac has been known as the language of specific Christian groups with distinctive theologies and liturgies.Footnote 6

After the Arab conquests of the 630s and 640s, the majority of Syriac-speaking Christians, regardless of their ecclesiastical affiliation, were under the imperial rule of the Islamic Caliph. It is in this context that Syriac became a crucial vehicular language in Abbasid Baghdad where, around 800, Syriac Christians were employed by the caliph to translate a host of Greek philosophical texts into Arabic. They did so by translating first from Greek to Syriac, and then from Syriac to Arabic.Footnote 7 This ‘translation movement’ produced, in particular, Arabic translations of Aristotle that eventually found their way into medieval Spain (al-Andalus) and were translated there into Latin. It was through these translations that medieval theologians like Thomas Aquinas became acquainted with a much broader range of Aristotelian thought. The translation movement in Baghdad included scholars such as Hunayn ibn Ishaq, whose translation practices have been carefully studied by, among others, the Syriacist Sebastian Brock.Footnote 8 Brock emphasizes that Hunayn was working within a long intra-Syriac tradition of translation. Indeed, Hunayn and his fellow translators very often signalled that they were making use of earlier Syriac translations of Greek works, and they critiqued and refined those Syriac translations even as they prepared their Arabic ones for the caliph.

Hunayn and his fellow Christian scholars who translated this literature were East Syrian (pejoratively ‘Nestorian’) Christians. I will refrain, however, from using the adjective ‘East Syrian’ because it conjures origins for this group in the geographical area of eastern Syria, which was the case only while the Syriac churches were unified and shared a common heritage, that is, prior to the fifth century. By contrast, ‘East Syriac’ refers to a distinctive variety of Syriac, especially in terms of literary and theological tradition, but also at the level of script and pronunciation. These were in reality the ‘Persian Christians’ who, since the Council of Ephesus in 431, had been ecclesiastically separate from Christians in the Roman Empire.Footnote 9 This was partly due to geopolitical factors – they were indeed in a different empire, that of Sasanian Persia, until the Islamic conquests – but also because the Western Churches had deemed them heretical in their Christology. The East Syriac or Persian Christians were associated in the West with Nestorius, the patriarch of Constantinople who had been anathematized and exiled as a heretic after the Council of Ephesus. Until that point (and for a while afterwards too, as the dust settled), the Persian Christians were affiliated with the patriarchate of Antioch and claimed two Antiochene exegetes, Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia, as their founding fathers. Regardless of these ties, however, the Persian Christians always faced East, and their formal disassociation from the Roman Empire only put into law what had been logistically the case already. Language was one key determinant in this regard. Unlike the Chalcedonian and Miaphysite (also known as ‘Monophysite’) branches of Syriac Christianity, the Church of the East never used Greek as a liturgical or literary language, and, as we shall see, the significance of Syriac in this unique tradition was carried everywhere they went.

East Syriac Christians were a part of a wide-ranging ecclesiastical body, one which was in constant and direct contact with Islam after the Arab conquests. However, the most eastward branch of East Syriac Christianity seems to have been less concerned with Islam and Arabic than it was with local indigenous cultures and languages along the silk routes. In this cultural matrix, it resembled much more the Manichaeism of Iran and central Asia than it did its own co-religionists in the Levant and Mesopotamia. It was through this eastward branch that much Syriac literature was translated into Middle Persian and especially Sogdian, and through Sogdian into Uighur, a Turkic language of western China.Footnote 10 It was also through this branch that Syriac literature and ideas found their way into Chinese and, consequently, that the first formal relationship developed between an eastern Mediterranean culture and the imperial court of China. The Syriac Christians in China were in origin central Asian Christians who, in the course of the fifth, sixth and seventh centuries had already translated their literature, and indeed their cultural outlook, from Syriac into Iranian languages, notably the east Iranian language of Sogdian, used by a major trading society covering the whole of central Asia.

However, what I hope to emphasize in this article is that, to tell the story of this eastward movement across the silk routes, it is imperative to begin at the end, with Christianity in China. This is because the evidence from China offers the best clues to the identity, culture and self-understanding of the East Syriac Christians across central Asia at the end of Late Antiquity. It is also because Christians in China produced the most significant, self-reflective and ultimately perplexing surviving artefact that speaks to the continuity of Syriac tradition across central Asia and especially to its willingness to adopt new foreign cultures and to integrate itself into them.

The Nestorian Stele of Chang'an

The designation Jingjiao, introduced above, appears on the famous Nestorian Stele that was set up in Chang'an in 781 to commemorate the history and beliefs of Christians in China.Footnote 11 The stele opens, strikingly, with a short summary of Christian doctrine, one which is remarkably complete. It includes the following elements, listed in their order of appearance (§§3–10): a singular, all-powerful triune God; the creation, including the creation of humankind; Satan and the fall; the incarnation; the virgin birth; the ascension; twenty-seven books (jiao, ‘teachings’) left by the Messiah (i.e. the New Testament); baptism as initiation; the cross as an emblem (‘the figure of ten’); monks as the Messiah's followers; a weekly discipline of repentance; and an emphasis on holiness. Notable in their absence are the New Testament events or doctrines of the crucifixion and resurrection. At the end of their recounting these are labelled collectively as the Jingjiao, the ‘Luminous Teaching’. The stele goes on to tell the story that in the year 635 the first Christian missionary, Alopen, was received at the court of the Emperor Taizong (626–49). It then incorporates verbatim the edict from 638 granting permission for Christianity to be practised in China. This new appellation of Jingjiao in the Chinese context seems partly to coincide with the imperial view of the religion: as Taizong proclaimed in this edict: ‘The way does not have a constant name, and the holy does not have a constant form. Teachings are established according to the locality, and their mysteries aid mankind’ (§12). The edict also includes the official commissioning of a monastery in Chang'an with twenty-one monks to be ordained there.Footnote 12 It then offers a short dynastic history of the bishops and emperors of China and their relations, up to the date of its installation.Footnote 13

The stele, discovered in 1623, stands today in the Forest of Stelae Museum in Xi'an.Footnote 14 It is 270 cm high, 105 cm wide and 30 cm thick. It is inscribed with classical Chinese and Syriac inscriptions. An elegantly carved Chinese inscription – 1,756 characters over 32 lines – occupies the majority of the front face, and the Syriac inscription, in reality a colophon, occupies a small section of the front face at the bottom. The sides of the stele list names of clergy in both Syriac and Chinese. All told, there are three hundred Syriac words and names on the stele. In the introductory quotation above, Deeg is attempting to reset modern expectations of what we might find on this monument and in other exempla of Chinese Christianity, including twelve important texts written by this community that were found at Dunhuang early in the twentieth century.Footnote 15

I would like to argue that the Nestorian Stele should be read as a piece of historiography. That is, the stele organizes knowledge about the past and publishes it in a systematic (albeit in part propagand- istic) manner.Footnote 16 Moreover, the stele is the single piece of sustained self-reflection on the movement of Christians across the Silk Routes to China and as such has an evidentiary value that is unparalleled. This is where Deeg's provocative statement on the content of the stele comes into play. For Deeg, the Nestorian Stele is ‘linguistically and culturally Chinese’ and it shares more with contemporaneous Chinese literature than with anything else, including the Christian manuscripts found at Dunhuang.Footnote 17 Moreover, when taken as a whole – that is, the stele and the Dunhuang manuscripts together – there is only one text that can be verbally identified with a known Syriac text, the Gloria in excelsis Deo.Footnote 18 Thus we are thrown immediately into the problem of cultural ‘loans’ and the adaptation of the essentials of Syriac Christianity to autochthonous Chinese norms.Footnote 19 Essentialization of religions, languages and cultural systems does not help the historian gain purchase on the inscription or the people who made it. For instance, does the use of Daoist or Tantric Buddhist concepts and language in the Nestorian Stele mean that some type of syncretism is happening, or at least that contemporary Daoism or Buddhism had an impact on the Jingjiao?Footnote 20 Deeg concludes by suggesting that scholars of Far Eastern Christianity during Late Antiquity need to think across disciplinary lines and create a dialogue between scholars of China (Daoism, Buddhism), Oriental Christianity and Iran.Footnote 21

It is this conjunction that is most interesting and which provides an opportunity to consider the character of Christianity across central Asia. A close reading of the Nestorian Stele is unavoidable if one hopes to understand what was transmitted by Christians to central Asia and beyond in the fifth to eighth centuries. At the same time, the stele cannot be understood on its own terms without reference to the cultures from which Christianity came and, indeed, through which it passed en route to Chang'an and the construction of the stele itself. Deeg comes close to the very essentialization he is trying to avoid when he assumes there are stable categories of Syriac, Christian and central Asian with which he can compare Chinese literature from the period. The stele provides, as noted, the only sustained self-reflection on these categories for the regions and period and so requires the most sophisticated investigation we can muster.

The colophon at the bottom of the front face of the stele is worth quoting here in full. I include here the prologue of the inscription (the uppermost portion, reading top to bottom), the final section of the main Chinese inscription on the front face (reading top to bottom, right to left), and the Syriac section on the front face (top to bottom, left to right):

§1. [1] [Tit.] Stele (commemorating) the diffusion of the ‘Luminous’ Religion in the Middle Kingdom (China) –

[2] an eulogy and preface composed by the monk Jingjing of the Da Qin (Roman) [i.e. Syrian] Monastery. {Syr.} [S1] Adam Priest and Chorepiscopos and Priest (fapshi) of China (Chin(i)stan).

[The main Chinese section comes here.]

[31] §24. This (monument) was erected in the second year of Jianzhong (period), of the Great Tang (Dynasty) (781 CE), astronomically the year being Zuō’è, in the 1st month, being the Great Yàoseēnwén (Pth. ʿywšmbt /eēwšambat) Day and (i.e. namely) on the 7th day, while the Patriarch Ningshu (i.e. Henanišo‘) had the charge of the Church (lit. ‘luminous congregations’) of the East.

{Syr.} [S2] In the time of the Father of Fathers, Mar Henanišo‘, the Universal (Catholicos) Patriarch.

[32] §24a. Written by Lu Xiuyan, Secretary to Council, formerly Military Superintendent for Taizhou.

{Syr.} [S3] In the year One Thousand and Ninety and Two [S4] of the Greeks (1092 Sel. = 781 CE) My Lord Yazdbuzid priest [S5] and Chorepiscopos of Kumdān [S6] the metropolis, son of the [S7] late Milis priest, from [S8] Balkh a city of Tahuristan (i.e. Tocharistan), [S9] set up that tablet of stone. [S10] The things which are written on it [S11] [are] the law of him (who is) our Saviour and the preaching [S12] of them (who are) our fathers to the kings [S13] of Zinaye (i.e. China). {Chin.} [33] Monk Lingbao {Syr.} [S14] Adam minister [S15] son of Yazdbuzid Chorepiscopus.

[S16] Mar Sargis priest and Chorepiscopos.

{Chin.} [34] Supervisor of the erection of the tablet the monk [35] Xingtong. {Syr.} [S17] The priest Sabranīšō‛.

{Syr.} [S18] Gabriel Priest and an Archdeacon [S19] and Abbot of Kumdān (i.e. Chang'an) [S20] and of Sarag (i.e. Luoyang).

{Chin.} [36] Assistant Supervisor: the High Statesman of the Sacred rites, [37] the Imperially-conferred-purple-gown [38] Chief Monk Yeli [i.e. Gabriel].Footnote 22

These sections of the inscription move fluidly in and out of Syriac and Chinese characters, and in that regard they resemble more the left and right sides of the stele where the names of clergy are listed in both languages.Footnote 23 The seventy names of clergy on the bottom and sides in Syriac script are written vertically, following patterns present in Sogdian texts and gravestones from central Asia and western China.Footnote 24

The Syriac sections all seem to have a technical character to them, signalling the fact that the author of the inscription, Adam in Syriac and Jingjing in Chinese, was working, as expected, from a Syriac template.Footnote 25 The narrative section in Chinese, occupying the main part of the front face, was also presumably written by ‘Adam’ (’d'm in §S1), but retains a theological and rhetorical unity that may be attributed to the carver of the Chinese, named as ‘Lu Xiuyan, Secretary to Council, formerly Military Superintendent for Taizhou’ in §32. In the Syriac part of the prologue, Adam is given the title ‘Fapshy’, ‘Papshy’ or ‘Fapsh‘’ (p'pšy), translated above as ‘priest’ (§S1). This word has generated considerable debate, which I will not attempt to resolve here. Suffice it to say that ‘priest’ in the quoted translation is certainly incorrect since the standard Syriac word for priest, qšyš’, appears just prior in his titulature. The two main solutions proposed by scholars are: fa-shih (‘teacher/master of the law’), a transliteration of a commonly encountered Chinese religious title, and papas (‘pope’), a Syriac word misspelled here from the correct pp’ (from Latin papa) or p'pws (from Greek πάππος), due possibly to linguistic interference of Persian or Chinese.Footnote 26

Among these technical sections, the stele claims in two places, in both Chinese and Syriac separately, to have been erected in the year 781: the Chinese dating is made according to Tang customs, and the Syriac dating is made according to the Seleucid dating, completely foreign in China but standard in the Syriac Churches of Mesopotamia, Iran and central Asia. It also states, again separately in both Chinese and Syriac, that the Church was at that time under the rule of the ‘Patriarch Ningshu (Henanišo‘)’ (§31) and ‘Mar Henanišo‘, universal katholikos’ (mry ḥnnyšw‘ qtwlyq’ pṭryrkys) (§S2).Footnote 27

The author of the inscription, Adam, attributes the erection of the monument to ‘My Lord Yazdbuzid, priest and Chorepiscopos of Kumdān [i.e. Chang'an] the metropolis, son of the late Milis priest, from Balkh a city of . . . Tocharistan’ (mry yzdbwzyd qšyš’ wkwr'pysqwp’ dkwmd'n mdynt’ mlkwt’ br nyḥ npš’ mylys qšyš’ dmn blḥ mdynt’ dtḥwrstn) (§§S4–S8). He also gives credit to several other figures who assisted in the erection of the stele: first, another Adam, called a minister or deacon (mšmšn’) and son of Yazdbuzid Chorepiscopos;Footnote 28 Mar Sargis (i.e. Sergius), priest and Chorepiscopos; the monk Xingtong; the priest Sabranišo‘; the High Statesman of the Sacred Rites, the Imperially-conferred-purple-gown Chief Monk Yeli, (that is) the priest, archdeacon and abbot of Kumdān (Chang'an) and Sarag (Luoyang), Gabriel (§§34–8; S14–S20).

Taken together these names, titles and locales give the sense that two separate cultures invested in this monument in 781: Persian Christians in China, who traced their lineage to specific bishoprics in Iran; and local Chinese figures, both monks and laymen, who participated in its erection. As noted above, standing at the head of all these individuals, in both Chinese and Syriac, is the name Mar Henanišo‘, the catholicos of the Church of the East, resident in Seleucia-Ctesiphon.Footnote 29 The two separate cultures thus signal their allegiance to a centre of Church order and unity far removed from the monument itself, even as they express that allegiance, in the details of nomenclature and dating habits, in terms consistent with the two separate cultures.

The Iranian element of East Syriac Christianity has become more and more important to scholars as a filter for understanding the stele and its implications. Despite the fact that there is clear bifurcation of culture on the stele into Chinese and Syriac components – without any overt Iranian linguistic strand (e.g. Persian or Sogdian) – the Persian character of the stele is clear. Important to note as well is that the Persian element is recognizable regardless of whether it reflects specific surviving Syriac texts. In an important study Erica Hunter has emphasized the Persian substratum of the language and organization of the colophon.Footnote 30 The Syriac term for ‘China’ is here zynst'n, which is not the standard word for China found in contemporary Syriac texts, Beth Tsinaye, but is instead the Sogdian term for the geographical location of China, known from numerous documents found in central Asia and western China.Footnote 31 The word tsinaye on its own is found in §S13, but without the expected beth preceding it. Moreover, for zynst'n the consonants themselves, and not just the vocalization, are different from tsinaye.Footnote 32 Indeed, the substitution of consonants here follows known patterns for the adoption of Syriac words into a Sogdian environment: notably, the -t'n ending is a geographical locator, related to ‘-stan’ in modern Iranian languages. In a similar manner, the names Kumdān and Sarag, for Chang'an and Luoyang (the western and eastern capitals of Tang China, respectively), while not found in surviving Syriac texts, are frequently used in contemporary Sanskrit and Persian texts.Footnote 33 The use of chorepiscopa and qashisha for clergy is very common on Christian gravestones from Semirechye (south-eastern Kazakhstan and north-eastern Kyrgyzstan) and Quanzhou (in China), where there was a strong Sogdian presence.Footnote 34 These titles were common across the Syriac world, but in Syriac texts of the period one finds much more variety in clerical nomenclature, so that it seems that by this time these offices had fossilized among the central Asian churches. It has been further suggested that the name ‘Alopen’ (the first missionary to China), long interpreted as a transliteration of ‘Abraham’, is more probably an Iranian name, possibly Ardaban.Footnote 35

In more general terms, even the preference for Daqin Jiao (‘Roman /Western Teaching’) over Bosi Jiao (‘Persian Teaching’) could be significant.Footnote 36 Paul Pelliot argued that this might signal an awareness of the final collapse of the Sasanian dynasty, in the sense that affiliation to the West (whether Rome or Syria) was preferable to the Chinese thinking the Persian Christians were in league with the caliph.Footnote 37 The last descendant of the Sasanian dynasty died in Chang'an in 707.Footnote 38 Between that date and the erection of the stele came both the battle of Talas in 751, in which the Chinese defeated the Islamic armies, and the Abbasid establishment of Baghdad as their new capital in 762. The Chinese imperial court was thus keenly aware of the Islamic threat on their western border, and the fact that the Abbasids claimed the Persian heritage for themselves complicated any claim to Persian (Bosi) origins the Christians in China might make. More recently, however, Barrett has argued convincingly that Daqin Jiao refers to a ‘utopian’ spiritual home of the Persian Christians, and not to a Roman connection.Footnote 39 Even more boldly, Todd Godwin has suggested an etymology of Daqin from the name Tajik, signifying the central Asian network which planted the Chinese Church to begin with.Footnote 40

It is obvious that Adam feels comfortable affiliating himself with a central Asian lineage, advertising that the donor of the stele, Mar Yazdbuzid, a priest and chorepiscopos of the church in Kumdān (Chang'an), was in turn the son of a priest from Balkh, the capital of Bactria in Tocharistan. The name Yazdbuzid is a Pahlavi name meaning ‘saved by God’. His father's name, Milis, was common among East Syriac clergy and appears in Syriac as early as the fourth century.Footnote 41 Yazdbuzid's royal connection is made clear from the language of the erecting (Syriac aqym) of the stele in a mode of commemorating a formal relationship to the Chinese emperor: ‘The things which are written on it [S11] [are] the law of him (who is) our Saviour and the preaching [S12] of them (who are) our fathers to the kings [S13] of Zinaye (i.e. China).’ In this rhetoric the Nestorian Stele mimics numerous other steles from the Tang period set up by Buddhist and Manichaean communities attempting to curry favour or emphasize pre-existent and longstanding relationships with the court.Footnote 42

Mar Yazdbuzid, in addition to being the impetus for the erection of the stele according to the Syriac section, has an even more elevated role in the main Chinese inscription on the front face. The final prose section in Chinese offers a mini-biography of this central figure.

The great Lord of Donations, the ‘Great Lord of Radiant Bliss, [Bearer] of the Golden [Seal] and of the Purple [Gown]’, simultaneously the Vice Military Commissioner of Shuofang, the Director of the Palace Administration, Receiver of the Purple Kāṣāya (i.e. gown/robe), the monk Yisi, was friendly and loved, had learned about the Dao and strived to practice it; [he] came from far away to China from the ‘City of the Royal Residence’; his skill was higher [developed than those of] the three dynasties, his arts more comprehensive [than] the ten perfections [of the art of healing]. After he had served obediently in the cinnabar palace he was inscribed in the princely tent (i.e. the military roll). The secretary [and] prince of Fenyang, the venerable Guo Ziyi, for the first time undertook a military mission in Shuofang. [Emperor] Suzong ordered that [Yisi] should accompany [him]. Although he had frequently visited the [imperial] inner court (nei) he did not claim a different [treatment while] being with the troops. He was the claws and teeth of the venerable [Guo Ziyi], he was the ears and eyes of the army. He could distribute his revenues and token of honours and did not accumulate them in [his] house. He donated the glasses of the received favour and spread the golden brocade [of his] retirement, in order to extend their (i.e. the Church's) old monasteries or to enlarge the halls of the law (fa); he adorned the halls of the corridor until they resembled the plumage of a pheasant in full flight. He caused the ‘Brilliant Gate’ to prosper even more and gave [his] riches away, based on humanitarian [grounds]. Every year he summoned the monks of the four monasteries and gave them, with respect, spiritual donations. When hungry people came, he fed them; when freezing people came, he gave them clothes; he alleviated the invalids of their suffering diseases and raised them; he buried the dead and gave peace to them. The excellent dasuo (i.e. the Christian clergy) had not yet learned about such excellence, [and] the white-clad ‘Masters of the Brilliant [Teaching]’ [for the first time] saw a man like this. [He] wished to have a great stele-inscription to be carved [in stone] to demonstrate the glorious deeds.Footnote 43

This narrative says that Mar Yazdbuzid – called here by his Chinese name Yisi – was ‘the claws and teeth’ of the Tang generalissimo Guo Ziyi (696–781) during the An Lushan rebellion (755–7) and had been assigned that position by the Tang Emperor Suzong (756–62).

Deeg has elucidated how the titulature and history surrounding Yisi is crucial to understanding the significance of the stele and the role of the Church in China and central Asia.Footnote 44 The stele was set up under Suzong's grandson, Emperor Dezong (779–805), as a way of connecting his contested reign to the high water mark of the Tang dynasty. Recalling Guo Ziyi, who had died in the year the stele was erected, meant, in the context of the stele, recalling and celebrating his military adjutant Yisi, who was now a Christian monk. However, the reverse is also true, that in the early years of the new emperor, Yisi was using the story of his relationship with the Chinese imperial house to reiterate the long-standing intimacy of the Christian Church in China with the emperor himself. The earlier section of the Chinese inscription, which narrates the history of the Church under successive emperors from the time of Alopen to the present day, thus becomes even more significant.Footnote 45 Furthermore, Yisi claims a personal relationship with Suzong, even apart from his role in the An Lushan rebellion, saying that he had visited the inner chamber of the imperial palace and had received the emperor's own honours for his service. Yet, as Deeg notes several times, it is curious – though perhaps not surprising given the stele's propagandistic tone – that Yisi himself does not appear in any secular accounts of Chinese history from the period. By contrast, Guo Ziyi's campaigns and role in the administration, especially as ‘a Tang loyalist’, are very well documented in the near-contemporary Old History of the Tang (941–5) and the New History of the Tang (1044–60), as well as in later Chinese imperial histories.Footnote 46 Nevertheless, the secular titles attributed to Yisi here are known from other sources, including other steles: in particular, the purple Kāṣāya was traditionally given to high-ranking Buddhist monks who entered imperial service.Footnote 47

Yisi (Mar Yazdbuzid) is thus much more important to the history of the later Tang Christian Church than the Syriac colophon admits. But even here, there are important parallels to draw between the two sections which can illuminate the Church's view of itself in China and how it was presenting its role vis-à-vis its roots in central Asia. Yisi was a northern central Asian immigrant from Balkh (called in the Chinese section wangshe, the ‘City of the Royal Residence’). To have a monk achieve such a high-ranking place in China was clearly significant to the legitimization of the expatriate Church. However, when taking the whole stele into account, it is important to recognize that Yisi's role is rhetorically situated within a much longer historiography of Christians in China and, indeed, across central Asia. Presumably his son, the chorepiscopos Adam/Jingjing and author of the inscription, was Chinese from birth, brought up in a fully bilingual and bicultural community of Syriac Christians in Chang'an. It is known that Adam/Jingjing participated in a common translation project of the Liu-boluomi-jing/Ṣaṭpāramitāsūtra with the Buddhist monk Prajña/Banruo in 786, meaning that he probably had some acquaintance with Sanskrit, in addition to Chinese and Syriac.Footnote 48 The immigration of Yisi into that bicultural world, even after the Church had existed in, and been favoured by, the Tang dynasty for a century, shows at the very least ongoing cultural interactions between central Asia and the Tang capital. However, it also shows that Chinese Christians conceived of the Church in central Asia as their mother Church or, to put it better, that Yisi's origins in central Asia were compatible with the message that Chinese Christians were conveying about their own identity within the Chinese social matrix.

An irresolvable knot of questions surrounds the precise dating of Yisi's conversion. Was he a Christian already in Balkh? If so, did his participation in missionary activity lead him to China? More likely, it would seem, is that he converted in China once he was there, after or in the midst of his imperial service. However, that does not rule out ongoing Syriac missionary activity between central Asia and China, and, regardless, the Chinese Christians were eager to claim his central Asian heritage. Did Yisi marry and have a child after he converted and was tonsured, or before? Why are his secular titles, here celebrated, so much more elaborate than his clerical titles and accomplishments? If he married after he became a monk, Yisi would have followed certain allowances made for Buddhist monks in the same situation, even as the Syriac Churches of the Middle East were in the same era insisting more strongly on celibacy among their clergy.

Regardless of the answers to these questions, the rhetorical parallelism between the first missionary Alopen and Yisi is evident, and the impression conveyed is that Yisi was a Christian from central Asia who, like Alopen, found favour with the Tang emperor. In this sense the stele is both historiography and a speculum principis, teaching that the current emperor, Dezong, should respect the Christian Church and its long history with the Tang emperors. The stele both colludes with Dezong's own rhetoric about re-establishing the Tang line of his grandfather, Suzong, and calls him to honour the dynasty in full by protecting the Christians.Footnote 49 It achieves this through pointing out the favour Alopen – and, by implication, all subsequent Syriac bishops in China – had received from the emperor, beginning with the second Tang emperor, Taizong (626–49), and extending to the present day.

Conclusion

In his recent study, The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity, Guy Stroumsa states: ‘the idea of translation, from an archaic to a common language, understood by all and sundry, was of the essence of [the Christians’] religion’.Footnote 50 He is here speaking about the fundamental role that the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (made originally by Jews, for Jews), played in the early Christian world. The ‘archaic’ language here is Hebrew and the ‘common’ language Greek (these are contestable labels and translation did not always proceed from archaic to common in any case), but leaving aside the terminology, his main point, that translations were a part of Christian identity from the beginning, is irrefutable. The Septuagint was the Bible of the earliest Christians, and the writers of books making up the New Testament cited the Septuagint nine times out of ten and did not feel the need (or in certain cases were not able) to return to the original Hebrew.

Further down the road, and continuing to the present, it should be emphasized that Christians have never considered translations of their holy scriptures to be defective in principle. Even though the original manuscripts of the New Testament were lost from an early point – or perhaps partly because the original manuscripts were lost – translations became a part of the fabric of Christian history, literature and worship. From the second century on, translations have been conceived of as missional and therefore fundamental not just to the descriptive reality of Christianity but also to its prescriptive nature. Stroumsa's point is even more significant in the context of his comparison with later Judaism and Islam. These were, in Islamic terms, ‘religions of the book’, that is, religions taking their impetus from divinely received and inspired scriptures, and all three – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – saw the revelation to Abraham, Moses and the Israelites as beginning that ongoing revelatory experience. On the other hand, Islam and Judaism (at least rabbinic and medieval Judaism) considered translations of their scriptures to be defective in principle. Translations existed in Late Antiquity – such as the Aramaic Targumim, which were read out alongside the Hebrew so that the Jewish congregation could understand – but they never took the place of the original texts in their original languages.Footnote 51 That is clearly not the case in Christian literary history, which used many translated texts, including translations of Scripture.Footnote 52

The Nestorian Stele is a preeminent example of the value of translation in late antique Christian history. The East Syriac Christians were attempting to communicate natively in a foreign environment, which required linguistic and cultural flexibility. In this context, the stele also gives us a sense of the continued value of Syriac as a language and of the central Asian institutions of the Church of the East. It also shows us that as late as the last quarter of the eighth century the Christians of China were continuing to hark back to the central Asian heritage of their Churches and presenting themselves as the heirs of this heritage to the literate public in China as a means of maintaining their favoured status under the Tang emperors. Crucial to this picture is the assertion that they used Iranian/Persian/Sogdian language and nomenclature, and that important individuals in their community, such as Yisi (Mar Yazdbuzid), continued to arrive in China and advocate for the Christians, even long after the Christian Churches had first been established in the 630s.

The question remains, however, what was their Christianity? What of the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian worlds had they brought with them? One vector for addressing this question is to look at the theological sections of the stele and at the handful of surviving Jingjiao texts and try to draw parallels between them and East Syriac theological concepts and language. However, this is not what I have attempted to do here, partly because that work has been done already, and partly because scholars have come to radically different conclusions about the amount of syncretism or borrowing between Jingjiao and Daoism, Buddhism and Manichaeism evidenced by those documents.Footnote 53 As asserted by Deeg in the quotation at the beginning of this article, very few direct parallels can be drawn between any of these texts, and, as a result, the training and emphasis of any individual scholar tends to skew the interpretation towards his or her scholarly matrix. Not that such treatments are not valuable, but there is simply too little common ground in individual texts, and too many texts, to do adequate justice to the cultures and religions involved on their own terms.

Ultimately, as suggested by Deeg's provocative statement, we are dealing with a question of essentials: what is Syriac about Christian texts in Chinese or Sogdian and, further, what is Christian about them? As noted, the summary of doctrine that stands at the beginning of the front face of the stele is remarkably complete, though certain Chinese words and concepts had to be used in order to communicate those doctrines to the Chinese public. The challenge is to understand how Chinese Christians, in narrating their own faith and beliefs before the Tang emperor, chose to use Chinese terminology – and even at the most basic level, the Chinese language – to communicate their history and identity in China in direct relation to the Syriac Christians in Persia and central Asia. There is no doubt that this relationship between Syriac, Mesopotamia, central Asia and China is complex. It is a very difficult problem fraught with lacunary evidence and, ultimately, it transcends any one scholar's competence. Deeg is correct in asserting that it must be a collaborative effort.Footnote 54 However, we must also be aware that very different interpretations of the trajectories of central Asian Christianity will emerge over time as the evidence continues to be sifted and as historical models require revision. I have tried to emphasize that the ‘Nestorian Stele’ of 781 is the most important example of Christian self-reflexivity surviving from Tang China or medieval central Asia. It deserves to be read carefully as a piece of Christian historiography. Only by continuing to put it in conversation with the Syriac, Iranian and Chinese historiography of the period will its nuances and the complex relationships engendered by Syriac, over such a wide geographical area and over several centuries, become clearer.

Footnotes

I would like to thank Peter Brown, Averil Cameron, Simon Ditchfield and Geoffrey Goble for their assistance in improving this article. The scholarly audience of the Ecclesiastical History Society's Winter 2016 Meeting was highly engaging and provided many excellent suggestions for improvement which found their way into the article.

References

1 Deeg, Max, ‘Ways to Go and Not Go in the Contextualisation of the Jingjiao Documents of the Tang Period’, in Winkler, Dietmar W. and Tang, Li, eds, Hidden Treasures and Intercultural Encounters: Studies on East Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia, Orientalia-Patristica-Oecumenica 1 (Vienna, 2009), 139–52Google Scholar.

2 I am grateful to my Sinologist colleague Geoffrey Goble for his assistance with the Chinese nomenclature throughout this article.

3 Many of the basic problems with the terminology are discussed in Lieu, Samuel N. C., ‘Epigraphica Nestoriana Serica’, in Exegisti Monumenta: Festschrift in Honour of Nicholas Sims-Williams, ed. Sundermann, W., Hintze, A. and Blois, F. de (Wiesbaden, 2009), 227–46Google Scholar.

4 This reported correspondence appears at the end of Book 1 of Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History. However, Eusebius seems to have known less about the Syriac Church than he suggests: Sebastian Brock, P., ‘Eusebius and Syriac Christianity’, in Attridge, Harold W. and Hata, Gohei, eds, Eusebius, Christianity, and Judaism (Detroit, MI, 1992), 212–34Google Scholar. Elsewhere, Brock argues that the Syriac Churches constitute ‘a third lung’ for early Christianity, in addition to its more familiar Greek and Latin traditions: Sebastian Brock, P., ‘The Syriac Orient: A Third “Lung” for the Church?’, Orientalia Christiana Periodica 71 (2005), 5–20Google Scholar.

5 The vehicular and prestige aspects of late antique multilingualism have been explored by Adams, J. N., Bilingualism and the Latin Language (Cambridge, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for Latin, empire-wide; Bagnall, Roger S., Early Christian Books in Egypt (Princeton, NJ, 2009)Google Scholar, for Greek, in Egypt; and Papaconstantinou, Arietta, ‘“They shall speak the Arabic Language and take Pride in it”: Reconsidering the Fate of Coptic after the Arab Conquest’, Le Muséon 120 (2007), 273–99CrossRefGoogle Scholar; eadem, ed., The Multilingual Experience in Egypt, from the Ptolemies to the Abbasids (Farnham, 2010), for Coptic and Arabic in Egypt. I have attempted to place Greek in the same sociolinguistic landscape across the eastern Mediterranean in Late Antiquity: Scott Fitzgerald Johnson, ‘The Social Presence of Greek in Eastern Christianity, 200–1200 CE’, in idem, ed., Languages and Cultures of Eastern Christianity: Greek, The Worlds of Eastern Christianity 300–1500 6 (Farnham 2015), 1–122.

6 During the fifth and sixth centuries, Syriac Christians split into three different groups: East Syrian (formerly ‘Nestorians’), West Syrian (‘Monophysites’) and Chalcedonian (‘Melkites’). The basic outlines of these theological differences can be found in Brock, Sebastian P., ‘The Christology of the Church of the East in the Synods of the Fifth to Early Seventh Centuries: Preliminary Considerations and Materials’, in idem, Fire from Heaven: Studies in Syriac Theology and Liturgy (Aldershot, 2006), 125–42Google Scholar. The labels ‘Nestorian’ and ‘Monophysite’ are considered derogatory and are not used by scholars out of respect for the modern-day adherents of these groups. In the Syriac world, these labels correspond to the living traditions of the Church of the East and the Syrian Orthodox respectively. The term ‘Melkites’ (Greek melchitai) – a late eighth-century coinage – comes ultimately from the Aramaic malkā, ‘king’, translating the Greek basileus, ‘emperor’; they were, we might say, theological royalists (basilikoi). In the period, though not today, ‘Melkite’ was a derogatory label applied to them by their non-Chalcedonian co-religionists in the East. The term today signifies ecclesiastically the Christians under the Eastern Rite Catholic Patriarchate of Antioch. The ancient Melkites are today called Rūm Orthodox, from the Arabic term for the Byzantine Greeks.

7 The scholarly touchstone for this movement has long been Gutas, Dimitri, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʻAbbāsid Society (2nd–4th / 8th–10th Centuries) (London, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, although his work has been strongly criticized for downplaying Syriac's role in this process. Fowden, Garth, Before and after Muhammad: The First Millennium Refocused (Princeton, NJ, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, redresses the balance to some degree.

8 Brock, Sebastian P., ‘The Syriac Background to Hunayn's Translation Techniques’, Aram 3 (1991), 139–62Google Scholar; idem, ‘Changing Fashions in Syriac Translation Technique: The Background to Syriac Translations under the Abbasids’, Journal of the Canadian Society for Syriac Studies 4 (2004), 3–14.

9 For the history of the Church of the East, see Baum, Wilhelm and Winkler, Dietmar W., The Church of the East: A Concise History (London 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Walker, Joel, ‘From Nisibis to Xi'an: The Church of the East across Sasanian Persia’, in Johnson, Scott F., ed., The Oxford Handbook of Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2012), 994–1052Google Scholar.

10 We know of these translations and Christian literature in these languages largely through the discoveries at Turfan (western China) in the early twentieth century. Ideally that literature would be read in conjunction with the texts surviving in Chinese. See the articles in the following collected volumes for collaborative attempts at doing just that: Malek, Roman, ed., Jingjiao: The Church of the East in China and Central Asia, Collectanea Serica (Sankt Augustin, 2006)Google Scholar; Tang, Li and Winkler, Dietmar W., eds, From the Oxus River to the Chinese Shores: Studies on East Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia, Orientalia-Patristica-Oecumenica 5 (Vienna, 2013)Google Scholar; Winkler and Tang, eds, Hidden Treasures and Intercultural Encounters; and now (unpublished at the time of the writing of this article) Tang, Li and Winkler, Dietmar W., eds, Winds of Jingjiao: Studies on Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia (Zürich, 2016)Google Scholar. I have discussed the Turfan materials as evidence for Syriac along the silk routes in ‘The Languages of Christianity on the Silk Roads and the Transmission of Mediterranean Culture into Central Asia’, in Cosmo, Nicola di and Maas, Michael, eds, Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity: Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppes (Cambridge, forthcoming)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 For the Nestorian Stele, I use throughout this article the edition, translation and commentary produced by L. Eccles and S. N. C. Lieu: ‘大秦景教流行中國碑, Stele on the Diffusion of the Luminous Religion of Da Qin (Rome) in the Middle Kingdom’, 27 July 2016, online at: <http://www.mq.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/55987/Xian-Nestorian-Monument-27-07-2016.pdf>, accessed 4 November 2016. The editors have divided the inscription into verses, the Chinese verses marked by brackets and numbered, and the Syriac verses marked by brackets with ‘S’ prefacing the number. Pelliot, While Paul, L'Inscription nestorienne de Si-Ngan-Fou, ed. Forte, Antonino (Kyoto, 1996)Google Scholar, remains the standard edition and commentary for the stele, he does not edit or comment on the Syriac text, which makes reading the monument as a whole through his edition more difficult.

12 On this edict and other sources for it in Chinese literature, see Forte's comments, in Pelliot, L'Inscription nestorienne, 49–373.

13 The dynastic history (§§13–22) is too long to summarize here, but notable events that could be explored in more detail include the requirement to display the emperor's portrait in churches or monasteries (‘temples’), the persecution of Christians in Chang'an in 713 and their restoration under the Emperor Xuanzong, the celebration of Christian liturgy in the Xinqing palace in 744, and the rebuilding and embellishment of churches or monasteries (‘temples’) by the Emperor Suzong. No mention is made of any emperor converting to Christianity, but several of the Tang emperors are described as highly favourable to the religion.

14 See Lieu, ‘Epigraphica Nestoriana Serica’, for a physical description of the stele; and Keevak, Michael, The Story of a Stele: China's Nestorian Monument and its Reception in the West, 1625–1916 (Hong Kong, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a history of its reception in the West.

15 See the translation and contextualization of these documents by Tang, Li, A Study of the History of Nestorian Christianity in China and its Literature in Chinese: Together with a new English Translation of the Dunhuang Nestorian Documents (Frankfurt am Main, 2004), 103–204Google Scholar; see also her study of the Chinese Christian inscription discovered at Luoyang: Li Tang, ‘A Preliminary Study on the Jingjiao Inscription of Luoyang: Text Analysis, Commentary, and English Translation’, in Winkler and Tang, eds, Hidden Treasures and Intercultural Encounters, 109–33.

16 Indeed, the noted Syriacists Muriel Debié and David Taylor included the Nestorian Stele in a notable article surveying Syriac historiography and chronicle-writing: Debié, Muriel and Taylor, David G. K., ‘Syriac and Syro-Arabic Historical Writing, c.500–c.1400’, in Foot, Sarah and Robinson, Chase, eds, The Oxford History of Historical Writing, 2: 400‒1400 (Oxford, 2012), 155–79Google Scholar. However, in her recent magisterial monograph on the writing of history in Syriac, Debié concludes that the stele is not a piece of Syriac historiography but rather a public document seeking to explain each culture to the other, arising from a purely multicultural environment where genre disappears, perhaps, in the process of the document's construction: Debié, Muriel, L’Écriture de l'histoire en Syriaque. Transmissions interculturelles et constructions identitaires entre hellénisme et islam, Late Antique History and Religion 12 (Leuven, 2015), 126–7Google Scholar.

17 Deeg, ‘Ways to Go and Not Go’, 139–40.

18 Ibid. This is also known in a Sogdian version from Turfan: Sims-Williams, Nicholas, ‘A Sogdian Version of the “Gloria in excelsis Deo”’, in Au Carrefour des religions. Mélanges offerts à Philippe Gignoux; textes réunis, ed. Gyselen, R., Res orientales 7 (Bures-sur-Yvette, 1995), 257–62Google Scholar.

19 Deeg, ‘Ways to Go and Not Go’, 141.

20 Ibid. 149; Huaiyu Chen, ‘The Encounter of Nestorian Christianity with Tantric Buddhism in Medieval China’, in Winkler and Tang, eds, Hidden Treasures and Intercultural Encounters, 195–213.

21 Deeg, ‘Ways to Go and Not Go’, 149.

22 Eccles and Lieu, ‘Stele on the Diffusion of the Luminous Religion’.

23 See the lists of these clergy in both languages: ibid. 9–14. On the names of the clergy and the habits of transliteration, see Erica C. D. Hunter, ‘The Persian Contribution to Christianity in China: Reflections in the Xian Fu Syriac Inscriptions’, in Winkler and Tang, eds, Hidden Treasures and Intercultural Encounters, 71–86, at 78–80; Takahashi, Hidemi, ‘Transcribed Proper Names in Chinese Syriac Christian Documents’, in Malphono w-Rabo d-Malphone: Studies in Honor of Sebastian P. Brock, ed. Kiraz, G. A. (Piscataway, NJ, 2008), 631–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘On some Transcriptions of Syriac Names in Chinese-Language Jingjiao Documents’, in Tang and Winkler, eds, From the Oxus River, 13–24.

24 Hunter, ‘Persian Contribution’, 72.

25 Compare, however, the suggestion that the ‘Dhūta Monastery Inscription’ served as a model for Adam: Forte, in Pelliot, L'Inscription nestorienne, 473–87.

26 For a detailed exploration of these options, see Eccles and Lieu, ‘Stele on the Diffusion of the Luminous Religion’, 19–22; Pelliot, Paul, ‘Deux titres bouddhiques portés par des religieux nestoriens’, T'oung-pao 12 (1911), 664–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar, cited by Hunter, ‘Persian Contribution’, 73 n. 10; Lieu, ‘Epigraphica Nestoriana Serica’, 236–41; idem, ‘The “Romanitas” of the Xi'an Inscription’, in Tang and Winkler, eds, From the Oxus River, 123–40; and, generally, Hunter, ‘Persian Contribution’.

27 As an aside, we know that Timothy I was elected catholicos of the Church of the East in February 780, suggesting to most scholars that the news of his election had not travelled to Chang'an by time the stele was erected. However, Timothy I's election occasioned some controversy in the Church of the East in Iraq. He was opposed by Ephrem of Gundeshapur (Iran) and by Joseph of Merv (Turkmenistan): Hunter, ‘Persian Contribution’, 73. Joseph of Merv tried to get Timothy's election annulled through Caliph al-Mahdi in Baghdad and when that failed he converted to Islam: ibid. 73, citing The Book of Governors: The Historia Monastica of Thomas, Bishop of Marga, A.D. 840, ed. E. A. Wallis Budge, 2 vols (London 1893), 2: 383 n. 3; in turn citing Barhebraeus, Chronicon Ecclesiasticum, ed. Abbeloos, Jean Baptiste and Lamy, Thomas Joseph, Gregorii Barhebraei Chronicon Ecclesiasticum: quod e codice Musei Britannici cescriptum conjuncta opera ediderunt, latinitate donarunt annotationibusque, 3 vols (Leuven, 1872–7), 3Google Scholar: col. 171.

28 It is sometimes presumed that, because he is given a different clerical office, this is not the same Adam who authored the inscriptions. Yet it is nevertheless intriguing that they share a name and that the son of Yazdbuzid is mentioned so prominently: Hunter, ‘Persian Contribution’, 77.

29 Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the traditional capital of Parthian and Sasanian Persia, had long been the ecclesiastical seat of the Church of the East but was no longer a centre of political and intellectual discourse under the Abbasids. Catholicos Timothy I moved the capital to Baghdad upon his election in 780.

30 Hunter, ‘Persian Contribution’.

31 Ibid. 74; Pelliot, Paul, ‘Christianity in Central Asia in the Middle Ages’, Journal of the Canadian Asian Society 17 (1930), 301–12Google Scholar, at 310–12. For instance, Thomas of Marga states in his ninth-century Book of Governors: ‘David was elected to be Metropolitan of Beth Tsinaye [China] – now I have learned concerning this man from the Epistles of Mar Timothy [I] – together with Peter his disciple who was alive and held the office of bishop of the country of Yaman [Yemen] and of Tsan'a [Sana]’: Book of Governors, ed. Wallis Budge, 1: 238, 2: 448, translation adjusted. On this passage and the knowledge of Thomas of Marga about the Eastern missions of the Church of the East, see Johnson, Scott F., Literary Territories: Cartographical Thinking in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2016), 115–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Hunter notes that the use of Beth Tuptaye in Timothy's letters could possibly refer to the bishopric of Tibet: Braun, O., ‘Ein Brief des Katholikos Timotheos I. über biblischen Studien des 9. Jahrhunderts’, Oriens Christianus 1 (1901), 299–313Google Scholar, at 308–9, with other references in Hunter, ‘Persian Contribution’, 74 n. 14. See also Dickens, Mark, ‘Patriarch Timothy I and the Metropolitan of the Turks’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 3rd ser. 20 (2010), 117–39Google Scholar, on Timothy I and the Church of the East among the Turks.

32 Lieu has argued that the consonantal orthography of zynst'n is replicated by the Greek word τζίνιστα which appears in the Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes: Lieu, ‘Epigraphica Nestoriana Serica’, 229 and n. 12. However, the τζ- cluster would seem to me to resemble more the Syriac tsinaye than the Persian/Sogdian z, even though all are distantly related. Given Cosmas's East Syriac connections and the fact that he mentions Church of the East monasteries in Taprobane (Sri Lanka) in the same passage in which he uses τζίνιστα, I would suggest that he is mimicking Syriac orthography and should not be taken as evidence of the widespread use of zynst'n outside Persian/Sogdian circles. The point here is that the stele is using a very unusual spelling for the Syriac term for China which is influenced by its trajectory across central Asia.

33 See Hunter, ‘Persian Contribution’, 77–8 n. 30. On the Luoyang Christian inscription, see Tang, ‘Preliminary Study on the Jingjiao Inscription of Luoyang’; Nicolini-Zani, Matteo, ‘The Tang Christian Pillar from Luoyang and its Jingjiao Inscription: A Preliminary Study’, Monumenta Serica 57 (2009), 99–140CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘Luminous Ministers of the Da Qin Monastery: A Study of the Christian Clergy mentioned in the Jingjiao Pillar from Luoyang’, in Tang and Winkler, eds, From the Oxus River, 141–60.

34 Hunter, ‘Persian Contribution’, 81. Many of the Semirechye inscriptions were edited by Chwolson, D. A.: Syrische Grabinschriften aus Semirjetschie, Mémoires de l'Académie impériale des sciences de St-Pétersbourg VIIe série 34/4 (St Petersburg, 1886)Google Scholar; Syrisch-nestorianische Grabinschriften aus Semirjetschie, Mémoires de l'Académie impériale des sciences de St-Pétersbourg VIIe série 37/8 (St Petersburg, 1890); Syrische Grabinschriften aus Semirjetschie (St Petersburg, 1897 edn). On the material remains in Quanzhou, see Samuel Lieu, N. C., Medieval Christian and Manichaean Remains from Quanzhou (Zayton), Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum, Series Archaeologica et Iconographica 2 (Turnhout, 2012)Google Scholar.

35 Deeg, ‘Ways to Go and Not Go’, 146–8. On the confusion surrounding the names Abraham, Aluohan and Alopen in scholarship on Christianity in China in this period, see Forte, in Pelliot, L'Inscription nestorienne, 375–428.

36 By 781, the term Daqin had become an archaic designation for the Roman Empire, the more common term under the Tang being Fulin. The word Qin was the name of an infamous dynasty in Chinese history (221–207 BCE) which ultimately gave China its name (Qin = Ch'in in Wade-Giles transliteration). The geographical significance of the Daqin in the context of the stele is still debated, but under the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) the Chinese interpreted the name Daqin (‘the great/greater Qin’) as deriving from themselves, because the Roman Empire resembled that of China: Lieu, ‘Epigraphica Nestoriana Serica’, 236–41; and now idem, ‘Da Qin and Fulin: The Chinese Names for Rome’, in idem and Mikkelsen, Gunther B., eds, Between Rome and China: History, Religions, and Material Culture of the Silk Road (Turnhout, 2016), 123–45Google Scholar.

37 Pelliot, L'Inscription nestorienne, 364; cf. Lieu, ‘The “Romanitas” of the Xi'an Inscription’.

38 Interestingly, the last seated emperor of Sasanian Persia, Yazdgerd III, having been defeated by the Arab armies in the battle of Nihavand in 642, was buried by the Church of the East's bishop of Merv in 651: see Lieu, ‘Epigraphica Nestoriana Serica’, 235.

39 Barrett, T., ‘Buddhism, Taoism, and the Eighth-Century Chinese Term for Christianity: A Response to Recent Work by A. Forte and Others’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 63 (2002), 555–60Google Scholar.

40 Todd Godwin, ‘Persian Christians at the Chinese Court: The Xi'an Stele and the Church of the East, 410–845’ (PhD thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, 2015), 84; see also Sundermann, W., ‘An Early Attestation of the Name of the Tajiks’, in Medioiranica: Proceedings of the International Colloquium organized by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven from 21st to 23rd May, 1990, ed. Skalmowski, W. and Tongerloo, A. van, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 48 (Leuven, 1993), 163–71Google Scholar.

41 Hunter, ‘Persian Contribution’, 75. Pelliot posited that Yazdbuzid was an Armenian: ‘Christianity in Central Asia’, 303. While there was a substantial exile Armenian community in Balkh, here the East Syrian context seems more likely, especially given that Yazdbuzid's father's name was Milis.

42 On contemporary Buddhist steles, see Wong, Dorothy C., Chinese Steles: Pre-Buddhist and Buddhist Use of a Symbolic Form (Honolulu, HI, 2004)Google Scholar. This special relationship is signalled throughout the Chinese sections of the stele and through various epithets and honours attributed to individuals, such as, in the colophon: ‘[36] Assistant Supervisor: the High Statesman of the Sacred rites, [37] the Imperially-conferred-purple-gown [38] Chief Monk Yeli’ (i.e. Gabriel).

43 Translation by Max Deeg, ‘A Belligerent Priest: Yisi and His Political Context’, in Tang and Winkler, eds, From the Oxus River, 109–10 (with typographical corrections and with slight modifications based on Eccles and Lieu, ‘Stele on the Diffusion of the Luminous Religion’); text and punctuation follows Pelliot, L'Inscription nestorienne.

44 Deeg, ‘Belligerent Priest’.

45 Ibid. 111–12.

46 Ibid. 110–12.

47 For this and an explanation of all the Chinese titles granted Yisi, see ibid. 112–14. On the significance of the Kāṣāya, see Forte, in Pelliot, L'Inscription nestorienne, 494–5.

48 See Takakusu, Junjirō, ‘The Name of “Messiah” found in a Buddhist Book: The Nestorian Missionary Adam, Presbyter, Papas of China, Translating a Buddhist Sūtra’, T'oung Pao 7 (1896), 589–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Huaiyu Chen, ‘The Connection between Jingjiao and Buddhist Texts in Late Tang China’, in Malek, ed., Jingjiao, 93–113; Deeg, ‘Ways to Go and Not Go’. On the Chongfu-si Buddhist monastery in Chang'an as a site for this intercultural and multilingual translation work, see Forte, in Pelliot, L'Inscription nestorienne, 429–54.

49 This argument can be extended further by tracing the activities of Suzong's early reign in reforming the tax system and curtailing the building of Buddhist monasteries. The stele was in this sense a ‘self-promoting and self-protecting’ mechanism of public identity-formation to which Suzong was apparently receptive, as evidenced by Buddhist and Manichaean petitions from the same period. See Deeg, ‘Belligerent Priest’, 115–18, especially 118: ‘I think it cannot be completely ruled out that some of the issues addressed in these petitions, although the emperor's reaction was not completely foreseeable, are reflected in some passages of the inscription.’

50 Stroumsa, Guy, The Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity (Oxford, 2015), 33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Subsequent to the Hellenistic period, during which Jews throughout the Mediterranean diaspora used Greek translations for their scriptures, not least the Septuagint, Hebrew began to take on a more preeminent role in self-definition of Jewish worship and community: Rajak, Tessa, Translation and Survival: The Greek Bible of the Ancient Jewish Diaspora (Oxford, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smelik, Willem F., Rabbis, Language, and Translation in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

52 As a counterpoint, one might cite the role of the Latin in the medieval West as the definitive scriptural language, in opposition to regional vernaculars. However, it was never claimed that Latin was the original language of the Old or New Testaments. Latin was a sacred and authoritative language, but the Latin Vulgate was still known to be a translation.

53 For a survey of the issues involved, see Tang, Nestorian Christianity in China, 103–44.

54 Another sign of this collaborative effort, which appeared too late for incorporation into this article, is Pier Giorgio Borbone and Pierre Marsone, eds, Le Christianisme syriaque en Asie centrale et en Chine, Études syriaques 12 (Paris, 2015).