REWRITING OF JESUS CHRIST: FROM THE SAVIOUR TO THE PROLETARIAN – A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ZHU WEIZHI´S JESUS CHRIST AND JESUS THE PROLETARIAN

• Authors: Liu Yan
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Zhu Weizhi, a Chinese Christian scholar, published his book Christianity and Literature in 1940, one of the first in China to study the relationship between Christianity and literature. However, it is not so well known that he also published two biographies of Jesus Christ: Jesus Christ in 1948 and Jesus the Proletarian in 1950. In these two biographies, Zhu had very different opinions about Jesus who was changed from the Son of God or the Saviour to a son of the working class. Jesus is described here as a proletarian or a revolutionary after the founding of New China in 1949. By doing so Zhu tried to make his faith appropriate to Marxism and the socialist ideology of the day. This paper will attempt to explore the apparent ‘need’ for a rewriting of the Jesus narrative by Christian intellectuals around this period of Chinese history in order to discover whether this rewriting was prompted by old traditional Chinese cultural mores which arguably could be described as being non-Christian and non-Western in their spiritual and political outlooks? Or indeed was it due to widespread anxiety about the fate of the Chinese nation whose postcolonial visions of a new Utopian society compelled ‘Chinese Christianity’ to make adaptive changes more suitable to the ‘New China’. These and other relevant questions will be explored in this article.

Keywords

EN

JESUS CHRIST; SAVIOUR; PROLETARIAN; POSTCOLONIAL RESISTANCE; INDIGENOUS THEOLOGY; WEIZHI ZHU; CHINA

• Publisher: Institute of Oriental Studies, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Asian and African Studies
• Year: 2016
• Volume: 25
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 173 – 190

Contributors

author

Liu Yan

• Beijing International Studies University, Chao yang qu ding fu zhuang nan li No.1, 100024, Peking, China