Jesus in Asia

This learned volume, by a distinguished professor of biblical studies, can be read and assessed on two levels. First, to my knowledge it is the most detailed and nuanced presentation ever made of the reception of the person of Jesus in Asia (with or without the appellation “Christ,” and often enough without Christianity). Second, Sugirtharajah is doing much more than adding new information about Jesus's presence in Asia. Himself an interpreter of the Bible and well aware of the history of its interpretation, Sugirtharajah is proposing an alternative to the quest to discover the real Jesus of history that has flourished since Albert Schweitzer's Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906). This search even today has some life to it; think of John Meier's magisterial A Marginal Jew, in at least five volumes, and the popularity of the writings of Bart Ehrman. But much of this work (Meiers excepted) has been largely deconstructive: ruling out what is not original to Jesus, rather than successfully discovering the “real Jesus.”Discontent with this too dominantly Protestant and Western quest, Sugirtharajah takes us to Asia. At the start, he reaches back to the eighth-century Nestorian stele and the so-called Jesus Sūtras in China, some dating as early as the seventh century, and then notes the sixteenth-century Jesuit Jerome Xavier's Mir'āt al-quds, a life of Christ in Persian composed for the Mughal emperor Akbar, a text that Sugirtharajah identifies as the first biography of Jesus in the modern sense. Chapters are then devoted to a series of intriguing figures: Hong Xiuquan (1814–64), who portrayed Jesus in light of Confucian tradition; the Hindu Ponnambalam Ramanathan (1851–1930), who wrote commentaries on the Gospels in Tamil Srilanka; Francis Kingsbury (C. T. Alahasundaram, 1873–1941), whose humanistic biography of Jesus ends with the crucifixion; Kahan Chandra Varma and Dhirendranath Chowdhuri, who around 1900 made attentive use of Western skepticism about the historical Jesus to observe that the Jesus imported by the missionaries was a mythical figure whom even Europeans did not take literally; Manilal Parekh (1885–1967), a convert from Jainism who was unsurprisingly attracted to the purity and nonviolence of Jesus; Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1885–1975), a scholar and statesman, whose Jesus embodied the values of Vedānta, which Radhakrishnan had throughout his career interpreted with twentieth-century sensibilities in mind; Ahn Byung Mu (1922–96), a South Korean scholar who was part of the minjung theology of resistance to dictatorship in the 1970s and found a liberative Jesus; and Shūshako Endō (1923–96), the Japanese novelist (most famous for Silence) whose Life of Jesus portrays a figure who stands in solidarity with the poor and excluded.Sugirtharajah has done a great service by bringing together all of these figures, placing them in context and reading them intelligently. His own voice enlivens every chapter, and he is unafraid to add his opinions about whether these interpreters succeeded or failed: Kingsbury is daringly interreligious when he writes about Jesus in Tamil, but dreary in repeating Western ideas when writing in English; Varma and Chowdhuri caricature Western ideas in order to criticize them; Ahn's Jesus in the end offers no more than old-fashioned pietistic platitudes and no serious political agenda; Endō’s Jesus disappointingly does no more than stand in solidarity with the oppressed—his Jesus suffers but does not do away with suffering.So what is Sugirtharajah really up to? Certainly, he aims at more than an anthology of Asian portrayals of Jesus. Rather, he sees in these figures a resistance to colonialism: Binding the chapters together are their hermeneutical presuppositions, their excavations of Asian resources, and their keenness to redeem Jesus from Western strictures. What runs through them are the “interventionist possibilities” of postcolonial thinking, where knowledge generated by the colonizer meets up with a refusal of the colonized to accept the colonizers’ view that the colonized are innately inferior to them.Imagining an Asian Jesus is an Asian pushback against Western missionaries. Jesus was received locally and taken seriously enough that these authors came to reject the notion that Western missionaries alone had the right to interpret who Jesus really was. Jesus was, after all, Asian, not European. Sugirtharajah establishes that Western and Asian scholars who were engaged in the search for Jesus had divergent interests: “In one case, it was about Christian distinctiveness, and in the other, Asian sensibilities and spirit. Both were pursuits for an uninterpreted Jesus and relied largely on the Synoptic Gospels. While the Western enterprise was eager to free Jesus from the tangled textual layers, Asians had an additional task of extricating Jesus from colonial associations.” Every generation and culture had to make sense of its own Jesus, but no one, Sugirtharajah thinks, could ever truly succeed in getting back to the Jesus of history.This point is worth making, but Sugirtharajah may in the end blur distinctions worth keeping. At stake in the West is not just a narrow historical quest but also a theological and even doctrinal desire to affirm the truth of God's inbreaking into the world of time and space culminating in the death and resurrection of Jesus. Unmooring Jesus of Nazareth not only from history but also from doctrine is refreshing, but doing so also blurs the differences, which there surely are, between Jesus and the great saving figures of Asia, from Rāma and Kṛṣṇa to the Buddha and Chinese sages. But even with respect to theological matters, it may turn out that Sugirtharajah's project will prove useful in clearing ground for a new comparative reading of Jesus and these other great religious figures of Asia

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