The Shengjing zhijie: A Chinese Text of Commented Gospel Readings in the Encounter between Europe and China in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

Abstract In the history of the Catholic mission in China from the arrival of the Jesuits in 1582 until the middle of the twentieth century, there was no Catholic Bible translation available. Nonetheless, the presence of various Chinese translations of biblical passages is significant. Among them is the Shengjing zhijie 聖經直解 (Direct/Literal Explanation of the Holy Scripture; ca. 1636–1642), written by the Portuguese Jesuit Manuel Dias (junior) 陽瑪諾 (1574–1659). It is an early translation of the gospel readings from Mass, accompanied with long commentaries and arranged in the order of the liturgical calendar. So far, this biblical, liturgical, and commentarial text has hardly been studied. This paper aims to contextualize the Shengjing zhijie in the history of both the European biblical tradition and the Chinese classical tradition from a cross-cultural perspective. Focusing on the formal traits, this paper associates the textual features of Shengjing zhijie with multiple European and Chinese sources. The scriptures and commentaries composed in the Shengjing zhijie demonstrate that this text is a creative integration of the European tradition and the Chinese tradition.