Found in Translation

Finding Jesus (and God) in Chinese
There’s an unofficial continuum of difficulty in the world of translation. The
easy side begins with finding words for the tangible things that surround us,
the physical objects we can see and hear and touch, those basic vocabulary
words we learn in a beginning language class. As words and ideas become
more complex and abstract, translation becomes more difficult. Transferring
religious texts into another language can be a veritable minefield.
Take this example: the Nestorians were a Christian group that was declared
heretical by the early Christian church. Back in the early seventh century, when
the Nestorian missionaries went from Persia to China, they unpacked their
bags and immediately began to translate and author texts in Chinese. The
problem? They had not been there long enough to fully grasp the Chinese
language. They needed help, so it seemed logical to ask the Buddhist monks,
who were already well versed in religious terminology.
But the Nestorian missionaries apparently didn’t realize that their Buddhist
assistants would convey central Christian messages by using terms that were
inseparably associated with Buddhism. For example, the Buddhists translated
the word God by using fo ( ), which is the Chinese term for “Buddha.”
Similarly, for the term Christian disciple, they used aluohan (
), which
means “Buddhist spiritual practitioner.” To confuse—or clarify—matters

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further, the Chinese terms are phonetic transcriptions of the original Sanskrit
terms for Buddha (
) and Arhat (
).
14
The Nestorian Christians might have passed off these mistranslations as
sincere attempts to find spiritual words for spiritual matters, but the
transcription of the term Jesus revealed a certain sense of humor, if not
outright sabotage. Due to the relative scarcity of syllables available in Chinese,
it’s possible to use a multitude of different characters (each of which stands for
the same-sounding syllable) to phonetically transcribe a single foreign word.
(See the story on the transcription of Coca-Cola in
Chapter 5
.) Because there
are so many to choose from, a translator usually tries to pick characters with a
descriptive or positive meaning. But the word that the Buddhist translators
chose for Jesus was yishu (
), which means “to move rats.” The modern
Chinese transcription for Jesus, Yesu (
), is more clever and more fitting.
According to Chinese name-giving customs, the first syllable of the
transliteration of Jesus is the family name Ye, which Yesu shares with the
Chinese Jehovah, Yehehua (
). Su, the second syllable and Chinese given
name of Yesu, has a number of meanings, one of which is “revive.” The name
is thus a play on Yesu as the resurrected son of God, while at the same time
transliterating the sound of Jesus.
15
But not all translations of important terms for Christian concepts have such a
lighthearted ending as the translation of the word Jesus. In fact, one translation
of God’s name may have resulted in the deaths of twenty million people. The
translator in question was a British missionary by the name of Robert
Morrison. His translation inadvertently influenced the Taiping Heavenly
Kingdom movement, which ended in 1864 after fourteen years of conflict and
a bloodbath across several provinces. It’s a frightening tale of unintended
consequences that has haunted many religious translators.
Morrison finished the first translation of the Chinese Bible in China in 1822.
For the New Testament, Morrison and his assistants, most of whom were
Chinese, relied on a partial New Testament translation of Catholic origin. But
for the Old Testament, they had to start from scratch. Many occurrences of
God’s name in the Old Testament were transliterated into English as Jehovah.
Morrison accordingly transliterated this into Chinese as Yehuohua (
),
and he chose characters meaning “old man/father,” “fire,” and “bright.”
In 1836, a failed imperial Chinese scholar named Hong Xiuquan was given a
Christian tract based on Morrison’s translation that included the term for
Jehovah. Shortly afterward, Hong experienced a nervous breakdown that he
later identified as a vision. In the vision, he described “a man venerable in
years (corresponding with ye ), with golden (corresponding with huo and

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hua ) beard and dressed in a black robe.” This image was likely inspired by
the transliteration of Jehovah in the very first sentence of the tract. This term
became a key part of the Taiping ideology—both Yehuohua as the personal
name for God and Ye (
) as “God the Father” later appeared in Taiping
writings. Convinced that he was the younger brother of Jesus, Hong set up the
Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and fomented violent rebellion based on his
pseudo-Christian beliefs for the next decade and a half.
16
How much responsibility should the early Bible translators bear for this
bloody time span in history? Surely no single translator is to blame. Perhaps
the results would have been the same, no matter what term Morrison and his
coworkers had chosen. Though it’s not for us to judge, the perceived burden
was immense, and it may help to explain why further discussions on the
translation of a term like God into Chinese have not been solved to the present
day. The debate over the translation of the Protestant Christian concept of God
into Chinese started in the early 1800s and raged in China for nearly a century,
swirling around intricate theological arguments about whether the term God
should be translated as Shangdi (
), which means “Lord on High” and was
used in the old Chinese classics, or Shen (
), which means “spirits” or “gods,”
a term that would be coined especially for the Christian scriptures with little
accompanying religious or cultural baggage.
The arguing parties battled passionately over whether the Judeo-Christian
God had already been intrinsically known to the China of antiquity—as
revealed in the myriad meanings embedded in the term Shangdi—or whether
China’s religious history, though burdened with a plethora of religiously laden
terms, had never been exposed to monotheism, in which case God needed a
fresh start with Shen. From today’s viewpoint these may seem like frivolous
arguments, but for the missionaries involved in these conflicts they were of
vital importance. After all, at issue was whether traditional Chinese religious
practices were to be condoned or condemned, whether the new religion was
actually not new but something that just needed to be revived, or whether the
missionaries even had a right to be in China in the first place. In short, the
translation of that single word was a very big deal.
17
Even today you can find different Shen and Shangdi editions of the Chinese
Bible, but unlike the missionaries, both terms live side by side quite peacefully.
In fact, many contemporary Chinese theologians argue that Chinese Christians
are uniquely privileged to have both terms to express a manifold nature of
God. According to this view, one of the terms represents a concept of divine
immanence (Shen), while the other represents transcendence (Shangdi). To
avoid complicating matters further, we focused here on the Protestant tradition

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only. Catholics had a similar discussion and came up with yet another term that
is used in Catholic Bibles today: tianzhu (
), meaning Lord of Heaven.
18
These stories shed a fascinating light on the role of the translator. Is the
translator simply a faceless and impartial converter of languages? Faceless
perhaps, but certainly not impartial. And definitely not a mere converter of
languages. Languages are living, breathing entities that can be formed into
virtually any shape or form that a translator wants them to inhabit. And if this is
true for the tangible world, it is multiplied exponentially with intangibles such
as religion.