Persian Christians at the Chinese Court

Persian Christians at the Chinese Court PDF Author: R. Todd Godwin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786733161
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The Xi'an Stele, erected in Tang China's capital in 781, describes in both Syriac and Chinese the existence of Christian communities in northern China. While scholars have so far considered the Stele exclusively in relation to the Chinese cultural and historical context, Todd Godwin here demonstrates that it can only be fully understood by reconstructing the complex connections that existed between the Church of the East, Sasanian aristocratic culture and the Tang Empire (617-907) between the fall of the Sasanian Persian Empire (225-651) and the birth of the Abbasid Caliphate (762-1258). Through close textual re-analysis of the Stele and by drawing on ancient sources in Syriac, Greek, Arabic and Chinese, Godwin demonstrates that Tang China (617-907) was a cosmopolitan milieu where multiple religious traditions, namely Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism and Christianity, formed zones of elite culture. Syriac Christianity in fact remained powerful in Persia throughout the period, and Christianity - not Zoroastrianism - was officially regarded by the Tang government as 'The Persian Religion'.Persian Christians at the Chinese Court uncovers the role played by Syriac Christianity in the economic and cultural integration of late Sasanian Iran and China, and is important reading for all scholars of the Church of the East, China and the Middle East in the medieval period.

Persian Christians at the Chinese Court

Persian Christians at the Chinese Court PDF Author: R. Todd Godwin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786733161
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Xi'an Stele, erected in Tang China's capital in 781, describes in both Syriac and Chinese the existence of Christian communities in northern China. While scholars have so far considered the Stele exclusively in relation to the Chinese cultural and historical context, Todd Godwin here demonstrates that it can only be fully understood by reconstructing the complex connections that existed between the Church of the East, Sasanian aristocratic culture and the Tang Empire (617-907) between the fall of the Sasanian Persian Empire (225-651) and the birth of the Abbasid Caliphate (762-1258). Through close textual re-analysis of the Stele and by drawing on ancient sources in Syriac, Greek, Arabic and Chinese, Godwin demonstrates that Tang China (617-907) was a cosmopolitan milieu where multiple religious traditions, namely Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism and Christianity, formed zones of elite culture. Syriac Christianity in fact remained powerful in Persia throughout the period, and Christianity - not Zoroastrianism - was officially regarded by the Tang government as 'The Persian Religion'.Persian Christians at the Chinese Court uncovers the role played by Syriac Christianity in the economic and cultural integration of late Sasanian Iran and China, and is important reading for all scholars of the Church of the East, China and the Middle East in the medieval period.

Persian Christians at the Chinese Court

Persian Christians at the Chinese Court PDF Author: R. Todd Godwin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786723166
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
The Xi'an Stele, erected in Tang China's capital in 781, describes in both Syriac and Chinese the existence of Christian communities in northern China. While scholars have so far considered the Stele exclusively in relation to the Chinese cultural and historical context, Todd Godwin here demonstrates that it can only be fully understood by reconstructing the complex connections that existed between the Church of the East, Sasanian aristocratic culture and the Tang Empire (617-907) between the fall of the Sasanian Persian Empire (225-651) and the birth of the Abbasid Caliphate (762-1258). Through close textual re-analysis of the Stele and by drawing on ancient sources in Syriac, Greek, Arabic and Chinese, Godwin demonstrates that Tang China (617-907) was a cosmopolitan milieu where multiple religious traditions, namely Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism and Christianity, formed zones of elite culture. Syriac Christianity in fact remained powerful in Persia throughout the period, and Christianity - not Zoroastrianism - was officially regarded by the Tang government as 'The Persian Religion'.Persian Christians at the Chinese Court uncovers the role played by Syriac Christianity in the economic and cultural integration of late Sasanian Iran and China, and is important reading for all scholars of the Church of the East, China and the Middle East in the medieval period.

Sino-Iranian and Sino-Arabian Relations in Late Antiquity

Sino-Iranian and Sino-Arabian Relations in Late Antiquity PDF Author: Jeffrey Kotyk
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004700838
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
What type of exchanges occurred between West and East Asia in the first millennium CE? What sort of connections existed between Persia and China? What did the Chinese know of early Islam? This study offers an overview of the cultural, diplomatic, commercial, and religious relationships that flourished between Iran and China, building on the pioneering work of Berthold Laufer’s Sino-Iranica (1919) while utilizing a diverse array of Classical Chinese sources to tell the story of Sino-Iran in a fresh light to highlight the significance of transcultural networks across Asia in late antiquity.

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church PDF Author: Andrew Louth
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192638157
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 4474

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Book Description
Uniquely authoritative and wide-ranging in its scope, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church is the indispensable reference work on all aspects of the Christian Church. It contains over 6,500 cross-referenced A-Z entries, and offers unrivalled coverage of all aspects of this vast and often complex subject, from theology; churches and denominations; patristic scholarship; and the bible; to the church calendar and its organization; popes; archbishops; other church leaders; saints; and mystics. In this new edition, great efforts have been made to increase and strengthen coverage of non-Anglican denominations (for example non-Western European Christianity), as well as broadening the focus on Christianity and the history of churches in areas beyond Western Europe. In particular, there have been extensive additions with regards to the Christian Church in Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, and Australasia. Significant updates have also been included on topics such as liturgy, Canon Law, recent international developments, non-Anglican missionary activity, and the increasingly important area of moral and pastoral theology, among many others. Since its first appearance in 1957, the ODCC has established itself as an essential resource for ordinands, clergy, and members of religious orders, and an invaluable tool for academics, teachers, and students of church history and theology, as well as for the general reader.

Mission Manifest

Mission Manifest PDF Author: Matthew K. Shannon
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501775960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
In Mission Manifest, Matthew Shannon argues that American evangelicals were central to American-Iranian relations during the decades leading up to the 1979 revolution. These Presbyterian missionaries and other Americans with ideals worked with US government officials, nongovernmental organizations, and their Iranian counterparts as cultural and political brokers—the living sinews of a binational relationship during the Second World War and early Cold War. As US global hegemony peaked between the 1940s and the 1960s, the religious authority of the Presbyterian Mission merged with the material power of the American state to infuse US foreign relations with the messianic ideals of Christian evangelicalism. In Tehran, the missions of American evangelicals became manifest in the realms of religion, development programs, international education, and cultural associations. Americans who lived in Iran also returned to the United States to inform the growth of the national security state, higher education, and evangelical culture. The literal and figurative missions of American evangelicals in late Pahlavi Iran had consequences for the binational relationship, the global evangelical movement, and individual Americans and Iranians. Mission Manifest offers a history of living, breathing people who shared personal, professional, and political aims in Iran at the height of American global power.

Jingjiao

Jingjiao PDF Author: Glen L. Thompson
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 1467467138
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
A balanced, accessible, and thorough history of Jingjiao, the first Christian church in China Many people assume that the first introduction of Christianity to the Chinese was part of nineteenth-century Western imperialism. In fact, Syriac-speaking Christians brought the gospel along the Silk Road into China in the seventh century. Glen L. Thompson introduces readers to the fascinating history of this early Eastern church, referred to as Jingjiao, or the “Luminous Teaching.” Thompson presents the history of the Persian church’s mission to China with rigor and clarity. While Christianity remained a minority and “foreign” religion in the Middle Kingdom, it nonetheless attracted adherents among indigenous Chinese and received imperial approval during the Tang Dynasty. Though it was later suppressed alongside Buddhism, it resurfaced in China and Mongolia in the twelfth century. Thompson also discusses how the modern unearthing of Chinese Christian texts has stirred controversy over the meaning of Jingjiao to recent missionary efforts in China. In an accessible style, Thompson guides readers through primary sources as well as up-to-date scholarship. As the most recent and balanced survey on the topic available in English, Jingjiao will be an indispensable resource for students of global Christianity and missiology.

The Routledge Handbook of Buddhist-Christian Studies

The Routledge Handbook of Buddhist-Christian Studies PDF Author: Carol Anderson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100063728X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 728

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Book Description
Buddhist-Christian dialogue has a long and complex history that stretches back to the first centuries of the common era. Comprising 42 international and disciplinarily diverse chapters, this volume begins by setting up a framework for examining the nature of Buddhist-Christian interreligious dialogue, discussing how research in this area has been conducted in the past and considering future theoretical directions. Subsequent chapters delve into: important episodes in the history of Buddhist-Christian dialogue; contemporary conversations such as monastic interreligious dialogue, multiple religious identity, and dual religious practice; and Buddhist-Christian cooperation in social justice, social engagement, pastoral care, and interreligious education settings. The volume closes with a section devoted to comparative and constructive explorations of different speculative themes that range from the theological to the philosophical or experiential. This handbook explores how the study of Buddhist-Christian relations has been and ought to be done. The Routledge Handbook of Buddhist-Christian Studies is essential reading for researchers and students interested in Buddhist-Christian studies, Asian religions, and interreligious relationships. It will be of interest to those in fields such as anthropology, political science, theology, and history.

Chinese Cosmopolitanism

Chinese Cosmopolitanism PDF Author: Shuchen Xiang
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691242720
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
A provocative defense of a forgotten Chinese approach to identity and difference Historically, the Western encounter with difference has been catastrophic: the extermination and displacement of aboriginal populations, the transatlantic slave trade, and colonialism. China, however, took a different historical path. In Chinese Cosmopolitanism, Shuchen Xiang argues that the Chinese cultural tradition was, from its formative beginnings and throughout its imperial history, a cosmopolitan melting pot that synthesized the different cultures that came into its orbit. Unlike the West, which cast its collisions with different cultures in Manichean terms of the ontologically irreconcilable difference between civilization and barbarism, China was a dynamic identity created out of difference. The reasons for this, Xiang argues, are philosophical: Chinese philosophy has the conceptual resources for providing alternative ways to understand pluralism. Xiang explains that “Chinese” identity is not what the West understands as a racial identity; it is not a group of people related by common descent or heredity but rather a hybrid of coalescing cultures. To use the Western discourse of race to frame the Chinese view of non-Chinese, she argues, is a category error. Xiang shows that China was both internally cosmopolitan, embracing distinct peoples into a common identity, and externally cosmopolitan, having knowledge of faraway lands without an ideological need to subjugate them. Contrasting the Chinese understanding of efficacy—described as “harmony”—with the Western understanding of order, she argues that the Chinese sought to gain influence over others by having them spontaneously accept the virtue of one’s position. These ideas from Chinese philosophy, she contends, offer a new way to understand today’s multipolar world and can make a valuable contribution to contemporary discussions in the critical philosophy of race.

The Luminous Way to the East

The Luminous Way to the East PDF Author: Matteo Nicolini-Zani
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197609643
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
"The Missionary Dynamism of the Church of the East It would be an attractive undertaking for the historian to be able to follow in the footsteps of those heralds of the Gospel, who went forth from Antioch with firmness and tenacity in those early days making their way to the East . . . building new centers of Christian irradiation, creating communities and spreading the doctrine of Jesus everywhere. The interest would certainly grow if we were familiar with the challenges faced by these first evangelizers on their way to the Far East. Gaining that knowledge, however, is no easy task. Christ's teaching had to cover immense distances on its road from Antioch towards the East. . . . The details of this diffusion, however, remain obscure. There are no Acts of the Apostles, no Letters of Saint Paul, no contemporary or near-contemporary documents that might tell us how and when Christianity from the region of the Euphrates and the Tigris crossed over the mountainous regions of the Orient, how through Media and Parthia it went south to Herat and Segestan, and how it penetrated eastward, crossing the Margiana (Merv), into the region of the Oxus and the Jaxartes, and finally how it entered today's Russian province of Semireč'e, then Turfan, and then further south into the heart of China"--

ARTIFACT, TEXT, CONTEXT

ARTIFACT, TEXT, CONTEXT PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 3643961952
Category : Syriac language
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description