He had read in the Second Book of Esdras in the Apocrypha that God created the world in seven parts, six of them dry land and the seventh water. He figured that by sailing miles per day, he could reach the Indies in 30 days. Not until his third voyage did Columbus actually land on the American mainland. Seeing four rivers flowing from the landmass, he believed he had encountered the Garden of Eden. He died in unaware he had landed thousands of miles short of the Orient.
Though the move had the approval of Pope Pius IX reign — , Columbus was never canonized because he fathered an illegitimate child, and there was no proof he had performed a miracle. Between and , Spain sent some 15, missionaries to the Americas. Typically the government of Spain paid their full expenses. In the first fifteen years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico, Franciscans baptized about 5,, Indians; priests in Mexico sometimes baptized thousands in a day. Spanish missionaries attempted to establish colonies in present-day Georgia and South Carolina in In , Dominican Juan de Padilla planted a cross in present-day Kansas.
Reformer John Calvin sent two Protestant pastors to accompany a Protestant expedition to Brazil in Upon arrival, however, the leader of the expedition betrayed the settlers, and the project was abandoned.
Confucian scholars, and many Western observers after them, may have emphasized the rationalist, humanist, and rather prosaic dimension of Confucianism. But it was founded on a base of religious assumptions, no less strong for being unstated. Since the 11th century, the emperor had assumed the role of First Plowman. He launched the agricultural year by plowing the first furrow, a ceremony that was maintained in Vietnam until , three years before imperial rule came to an end in revolution.
This was one of many such religious duties to be performed only by the emperor. Ancestor worship and filial piety were the cardinal virtues that governed the lives of all. When still only a pretender to the throne, the eventual founder of the Nguyen dynasty, Gia Long, allowed his heir to be converted to Catholicism as a means of gaining support from Christian missionaries. The young prince was so thoroughly converted to Catholicism that he refused to perform the all-important rites of worship to his ancestors.
Gia Long complained that not only his heir but also a great many of his courtiers refused to perform the rites that were a necessary part of court life. How would the court function if no one was left to carry out these ceremonies? Fortunately, the young Christian prince died before his father, allowing the succession to go to a half-brother who had been brought up in the strictest Confucian tradition.
The calamity of having on the throne an emperor who would not perform the religious duties that went with his imperial functions was thus averted. Had the Catholic prince inherited the throne, not only would court life have been brought to a halt, but the well-being of the whole nation would have been jeopardized as well, for the emperor was the Son of Heaven.
To him, and him only, devolved the duty to mediate between Heaven and man, and to ensure the welfare of his people by acting according to Heaven's will in all things, political as well as personal. If he sinned in any way, Heaven might choose to punish him by visiting disaster upon his people. Thus, any calamity, any instance of misfortune was interpreted as a sign of Heaven's displeasure with the emperor. Gia Long's great-grandson, Tu Duc, ascended the throne by edging out his two older brothers.
Not unnaturally, both were incensed and rebelled. For reasons of state, Tu Duc was forced to put them to death. But to kill one's brothers, especially one's older brothers, was to go against the most basic Confucian ethics. No wonder that Tu Duc, faced with the threat of colonial conquest, blamed himself for visiting misfortune upon his people. Believing himself solely responsible for this calamity, he dealt with the French threat with a heavy dose of fatalism that perhaps sealed the fate of his nation.
French rule over Vietnam lasted for eighty years. Tu Duc's acceptance of responsibility for the national calamity underlined the Confucian idea that only the emperor had religious duties. As his representatives, officials shared in these functions, performing at the local level ceremonies which the emperor performed in his court.
It was feared that if common people were to usurp these religious powers, only evil spirits would answer to their call, and disorder would reign throughout the land. All that common people were expected to do was to support the emperor and his representatives by paying taxes and being loyal and obedient subjects.
Obviously, it was impossible to enforce such an ideology which deprived common people of any religious role. Confronted with the ineradicable nature of popular religion, the state tried to make use of it for its own ends.
One particular area of concern was the role of religion at the village level. There is a Vietnamese saying which likens the village to a smaller version of the imperial court. In thinking about village religion, it is useful to bear this image in mind, for religion functioned within the village in the same way as it did at the imperial court, providing the oil which smoothed its operations.
Village affairs were conducted in the communal house, where all official documents pertaining to the village were deposited. These included village census rolls, tax and land records, and the all important village by-laws. The existence of these bylaws, a mixture of administrative rules, customary laws and religious guidelines, has led observers to give credence to the saying that the laws of the king must bow before village customs.
In reality, these by-laws were always scrutinized by officials to make sure that they did not go against the spirit of imperial laws. Villages were far less autonomous than the popular saying would suggest. As the nation had its patron deities—the dragon-king and the turtle god—so had each village its own deity responsible for the well-being of its inhabitants.
Sometimes the village god was its founder, but it could also be a particularly famous former inhabitant or a locally-recognized deity. The state exerted control over village religion by investing village gods with its stamp of approval.
Thus graciously granted recognition, the god was enthroned in the national pantheon of deities to whom it was permitted to give worship. It came as a shock to 19th century officials that in one village, the inhabitants had chosen a thief as their village god, and in another, a famous rebel. In still another, the village inhabitants had chosen a woman of dubious morals. Religion was too important for peasants to exercise their whimsy. It was the officials' duty to persuade them to choose a more suitable object of veneration.
Then there was the vexing question of local cults, in particular fertility rites, which made peasants behave in ways definitely not sanctioned by Confucian ethics. Not to mention the pervasive presence of Buddhist pagodas and Taoist temples, and the possible subversive activities of various practitioners of popular religion.
But all this exercised the ire of state officials much more than the peasants. What tore Vietnamese communities apart was Christianity's challenge to village religion. Just as the court could not function without the proper religious ceremonies, no village affairs could be conducted without the proper worship to the village god.
There existed a religious council in each village to ensure that ceremonies were carried out properly. What happened then, when some members of the village did not subscribe to the same religion as the majority of their fellow villagers? What happened if some refused to worship the village god? The court had been spared the dilemma when the Catholic crown prince died.
But for many villages, there was no avoiding a confrontation. The Catholic religion expressly forbade the worship of false idols. So how could Vietnamese Catholics participate in village life which always began with the requisite rites to the tutelary god? Either they must be barred from doing so, or else village life would have to be restructured in a fundamental way. Another vexing issue was the authority of the parish priest which took precedence, in the eyes of his flock, over the authority of the village council.
The easiest way out of this dilemma was for Catholics to secede from their native villages and establish new ones under the leadership of their parish priests. Often, the new villages existed side by side with the original ones. Sometimes, however, the priest led his parishioners into uncultivated areas and founded entirely new communities. In these overwhelmingly Catholic villages, it was possible for the Vietnamese Christians to lead their lives according to the dictates of their faith.
However, resettlement did not end friction with non-Catholic communities nor with the state, for not only did Catholics refuse to acknowledge as ultimate authority either the village god, or the emperor, they also did not worship their own ancestors, a sign of moral turpitude. Instead they worshipped a cross upon which was nailed a half-naked man, and they believed in the most extraordinary nonsense. At least, so it appeared to Emperor Minh Mang after he conscientiously perused the Bible:.
This Western book says that in the age of Yao there was a flood. Their country' s prince used one great ship and took all the people and birds and animals within the country and fled to occupy the inaccessible top of a high mountain. Later the people daily increased but all of them stemmed from the ancestry of these seven people. Such a theory is truly unfounded [The book] also says that their country had one prince who led the people of the country to manufacture and erect a heavenly pagoda.
Its height was goodness knows how many thousands of truong and he wanted to climb it and roam the heavenly palace in order to examine conditions in heaven. The emperor of heaven was afraid and immediately ordered heavenly bureaucrats to come down and change their tones [languages], causing them to be unable mutually to work together.
Hence they were unable to complete their pagoda. That every place in their country now has different languages and customs is attributed to this. This theory is even more irrational. Throughout much of the 19th century, Catholics were persecuted, for the alien nature of their beliefs, for their insistence on putting God above the emperor, and for their suspected links with the foreigners who threatened Vietnamese independence. Catholics were the victims of the most extreme efforts at suppression, but others also suffered, as the state asserted as never before its claims to ultimate religious and political authority.
One method of enforcing orthodoxy applied mostly to Buddhism. It consisted of imposing bureaucratic control over the organization and size of the Buddhist clergy through the supervision of doctrinal exams and ordinations into the clergy; limiting the number of temples that were built and the amount of land they were given; and manipulating the distribution of cultic and scriptural materials that were channeled through the court.
Taoist priests, not being organized, were much less amenable to this form of control. But the more the state tried to enforce orthodoxy, the more it invited challenges from more traditional quarters, challenges which could be open, taking the form of rebellion, or merely implicit.
The state's concern over the link between religion and rebellion was far from fanciful. In times past, Buddhist monks and Taoist priests had been known to lead movements of rebellion.
Monasteries were still being used as places of refuge by rebels against the throne. This was one powerful reason behind the efforts to regulate Buddhist monasteries in the 19th century.
It was easy enough to limit the number of ordained monks, and to defrock those who did not meet the standards set by the officials. However, given the limited resources of the traditional state, it was harder to prevent people from pursuing a religious life in places where the state did not penetrate.
Such was the case of the southwestern frontier, a pioneer region through much of the 19th century, a meeting ground for various ethnic, cultural and religious groups, and thus a fertile place for heterodoxies to flourish. For reasons that are not clear, Catholic missionaries were not successful in attracting converts in the south before the colonial period. Most of the Catholics who were in South Vietnam in the s were refugees from the north, or had become Catholics during the French colonial period.
The brand of heterodoxy that flourished in the south in the 19th century was thus a product of Vietnamese popular religion, a mixture of Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian and animist beliefs. What distinguished this heterodoxy from the state religion was partly the prominence of Buddhism and Taoism over Confucianism, and partly a fundamentally different world-view.
Confucianism was at base optimistic; life was good, nature was kind. This view was a logical outgrowth of the idea that the emperor's rule was benign and beneficial. Vietnamese religious dissidents, on the contrary, held a much more pessimistic view of life. Theirs was an apocalyptic vision of history. According to this interpretation, the cosmos evolved in series of cycles. Each of these cycles included a phase of prosperity, decay and ruin. At the end of each cycle, when ruin, disasters and wickedness had taken over, there would be an apocalyptic event, a flood perhaps, or a cosmic conflagration, or a huge typhoon.
It would engulf the world and cleanse it of evil. All wickedness would disappear, and only what was good and virtuous would remain.
The forces of the cosmos would rearrange themselves in a new "creation of Heaven and establishment of Earth" tao thien lap dia , and a new era of peace, prosperity and virtue would begin. It was believed that our present era, ruled over by the historic Buddha Gautama, was about to end, and that it would be replaced by the era of Maitreya, the Future Buddha. Maitreya was a popular figure of worship throughout the history of Vietnamese Buddhism. In the Temple of the Heavenly Mother in Hue stands a huge statue of him.
Until the 19th century, he embodied hope rather than despair. He symbolized the aspirations of Vietnamese Buddhists for salvation and rebirth in his Pure Land. Even though predictions of an impending apocalypse had surfaced many times over the centuries, the Maitreya ideal was not linked to the fear of apocalypse.
In the s, however, a new religious movement was founded on the claim that the apocalypse was about to come, and that all wickedness was to be destroyed. Then, the Buddha Maitreya would descend to usher in a new millennium of peace and prosperity. The exact location of his descent was to be a desolate hilly area near the Cambodian border in southwestern Vietnam. Those who wished to strive for salvation and rebirth in the reign of Maitreya were to gather there to cultivate themselves and lead a good life.
The Western quest was pervaded by a desire to protect and promote Jesus as a secure shield against the threat of modernity. Asian Christians did not face such threats and questions. Their question was how to de-colonise the Jesus who came with the invaders.
So, there was no interest or impetus among the scholars from South Asia to embark upon a search similar to that of the West. As I demonstrated in the book, only a few Asian scholars pursued this out of their personal, theological and political need and interest. Incidentally, the search for the historical Jesus and search for the colonies happened at the same time.
Chinese depiction of Jesus and the rich man Mark 10 , , Beijing. Image via Wikimedia Commons. How has postcolonial study redefined the approach to writing about and studying Jesus? Can you cite examples? Although Jesus was from West Asia, he did not come to this continent as a Mediterranean peasant but as a tribal and triumphalistic God of the West.
He was proclaimed as the Cosmic Christ, the one who rules and controls the whole world. What post-colonialism tries to do is to interrupt such hegemonic and totalising forms of European interpretation. Secondly, it exposes imperial impulses embedded in the teachings of Jesus.
What one fails to notice is that buried behind the anti-colonial oratory of Jesus there lurks an imperial thinking which speaks the language of control, supremacy, and judgment. The kingdom is a worldwide empire under the God of the Christians. In an increasingly multi-religious world, such a claim is arrogant and paternalistic. Thirdly, post-colonialism questions the notion of a single divine hero saving the world — a notion perpetuated by the Western search which limits humans experience of God.
Post-colonialism would like to throw open this access to include historical events, cultic remembrances, everyday occurrences, and natural manifestations.
What post-colonialism does is to portray Jesus as a complex and complicated figure. What is the counterargument to this assertion, and why do you find these texts faulty? The form of Christianity found along the Silk route was Nestorianism, founded along the teachings of Nestorius, a fifth-century patriarch of Constantinople whose unorthodox views had outraged the Roman and Byzantine worlds.
Thomas as early as the first century of the Christian era. Although historians are skeptical about the factual accuracy of Biblical texts, the reference to King Gondophares, who was the founder of the Indo-Parthian kingdom in the first century CE, gives it an appearance of truth.
Interestingly, the Syrian Christian community that exists in the Malabar coast of India, too trace their descent to St. Also read: How the earliest Christians of India absorbed Hindu traditions. In the course of the next couple of centuries, however, Nestorianism also traveled into northern Pakistan through the silk route, and intermingled with the Thomanian Christians present in the area to form settlements.
At present though, there is no Nestorian Christian community in Pakistan. While the discovery of the cross has indeed generated immense interest in the history of Christianity in Pakistan, this is definitely not the first finding that points towards a Nestorian Christian past in Gilgit Baltistan. Bhatti explains that the cross at Baltistan is very similar to one that was discovered in at the archaeological site of Sirkap near Taxila.
He says that two sites in particular have shown several shreds of evidence of Nestorian Christian settlements.
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