Interpretation and Divergence: Responses to the Dissemination of Jesus’s Image in Ming and Qing Society

Abstract

When Catholic missionaries came to the East in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, they constructed and disseminated the image of Jesus through such forms as paintings and Chinese-language writings. In important works such as Images in a Booklet Presented to His Majesty, the missionaries intentionally pointed out the dual nature of Jesus as both divine and human in order to disseminate this key Christological concept to their Chinese audience. However, the tensions that existed within the very image of Jesus constructed by the missionaries itself led opponents of the religion to form certain misunderstandings and distortions of Jesus’s image. The dismantling and criticism of the image of Jesus on the part of opponents to Christianity in China continued all the way up to the high tide of nationalism in the late Qing dynasty. The “fragmentation” that appeared in the missionaries’ construction of the image of Jesus was one of the main reasons leading to the appearance of such errors in Chinese people’s understanding of Jesus’s image. The dissemination of the image of Jesus and the process of its reflection in Ming and Qing society can thus be seen as a classic case of the transfiguration of Western knowledge or culture in the early modern Chinese context.