During my first year of teaching in China (1984–1985), officials from the Foreign Affairs Office of Henan Province decided to take all the foreign teachers in Henan to the ancient city of Xi’an for Christmas. Truth be told, we would have preferred to remain at our schools and have our own low-key celebrations with friends and teammates. But we knew they meant well (or wanted a free trip themselves), so off we went.
On Christmas Day, they took us for a long walk on the ancient city wall and then to a famous jiaozi (dumpling) restaurant. “Remember,” we kept telling ourselves as we longingly thought of Christmas at home, “They mean well.”
Xi’an’s most famous tourist spot is the archaeological site of the Terra-Cotta Warriors. Discovered in the early 1970s, these life-like figures had been buried for almost 2000 years. It was amazing to see and remained a favorite place to visit for all the years I lived in China.
Another interesting place we visited that Christmas weekend was the Forest of Steles, a sprawling complex of temples and halls that houses a collection of giant marble tablets with descriptions of important historical events carved on them. Since the city had been the capital of numerous ancient dynasties, it is natural that there is a large collection there.
While most of the steles told the accounts of emperors going hither and yon and engaged in this war or that, or promulgating policies, there was one that was of particular interest to me. It was a black marble stele that told the story of a religion called Jingjiao that had existed in the Chinese empire in the late 600s and early 700s. The stele was lost to history until 1625. Catholic missionaries who were in China at the time studied it and deemed that it described a group of Christians from the heretical Nestorian sect. Ever after, the stele has been called The Nestorian Stele, and the religion it describes is Nestorian Christianity. It marked the first evidence of Christianity in China.
Recent scholarship has begun to challenge the notion of certainty that the group of Christians who had made their way to China were Nestorians. One such scholar, Dr. Glen Thompson, has recently published a book called, Jingjiao: China’s Earliest Christians in which he argues that we should refer to these early Christians by the name used on the stele: Jingjiao (Luminous Teaching). Last year, he summarized his thoughts in a ChinaSource article, “Jingjiao – Not Nestorian.”
We have invited Dr. Thompson to give a lecture on March 20 at the University of Northwestern-St. Paul, in Minnesota, titled “China’s Earliest Christians: Who Were They and What Can We Learn From Them?”
You can register for the lecture here. It’s free and open to the public!
And if you have friends or others in your network, please feel free to share this information with them.
