Book Review: The Bible and Asia: From the Pre-Christian Era to the Postcolonial Age

Abstract

The Bible and Asia: From the Pre-Christian Era to the Postcolonial Age by R. S. Sugirtharajah is reviewed.

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The Bible and Asia: From the Pre-Christian Era to the Postcolonial Age . By R. S. Sugirtharajah . Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press , 2013. Pp. 320. ISBN 10: 0674049071 ; ISBN 13: 978- 0674049079 .

Book Reviews

R. S. Sugirtharajah, professor emeritus of Biblical Hermeneutics at the University of Birmingham, is one of the leading scholars on postcolonial biblical criticism and third world theologies. He comes from Sri Lanka and studied in India and England. His extensive publications including The Bible and the Third World: Precolonial, Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters (Cambridge, 2001) and Postcolonial Criticism and Biblical Interpretation (Oxford, 2002) are pioneering works in this field.

In The Bible and Asia, Sugirtharajah presents a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between the Bible and Asia. It includes both the influence of the Bible on Asia and Asian influence on the Bible. Although the Bible is a product of West Asia and Christianity was originally a West Asian religion, the relationship between the Bible and Asia has not received enough attention. Sugirtharajah tries to correct this imbalance in this book. The scope is extraordinarily wide. It extends literally "from the Pre-Christian Era to the Postcolonial Age." The book treats not only West Asia as the background of the Bible but also South Asia (India, Sri Lanka) and East Asia (China, Japan).

In Chapter 1, "Merchandise, Moralities, and Poetics of Aryans, Dravidians, and Israelites," Sugirtharajah explores the presence of India in the Christian Bible. It is well known that Indian merchandise like ivory, peacocks, monkeys and pomegranates appear in the Bible. Along with such merchandise, Sugirtharajah finds the origin of moral stories like the judgment of Solomon and poetical genres such as the Song of Songs in Indian literature. He goes as far as to suggest boldly that the Christian concept of the incarnation derives from the Hindu and Buddhist concept of an incarnate god (avatar).

Chapter 2, "Colonial Bureaucrats and the Search for Older Testaments," takes up two colonial bureaucrats in India who tried to replace the Old Testament with Vedic texts. John Z. Holwell and Louis Jacolliot reversed the prevalent perception among some missionaries and orientalists that the sacred scriptures in India were derived from the Bible. They deemed Hebrew scriptures to be "nothing but an eclectic choice of verses from the Vedic literature" (p. 79). By replacing the Hebrew scriptures with ancient Brahmanical texts, they thought it possible for them to "rehabilitate Christianity and guide it back to the pure primitive truths enshrined in the Hindu shastra" (p. 53). Sugirtharajah criticizes their attempt as a classic act of colonialism to take over "other people's texts and beliefs, emptying them of their content, and redeploying them with theological and ideological elements of the domineering culture" (pp. 75-6). He does not forget to point out the anti-Semitic aspect of their attempt. All the same, Sugirtharajah finds their attempt quite suggestive for Asian interpreters because they "invite Asian interpreters to look beyond the traditional notion of God's self-disclosure through a Semitic idiom and heritage" (p. 82).

In Chapter 3, "Enlisting Christian Texts for Protest in the Empire," an ambiguous role the Bible took in the colonial age is described. Although the Bible came to Asia in connection with European colonialism, the protest against colonialism and imperialism often used the Bible itself as its most effective weapon. Sugirtharajah presents three important figures as examples: Raja Rammohun Roy, Hong Xiuquan, and J. C. Kumarappa. The most interesting case is that of Roy.

Roy is called the "Father of Modern India." He founded the Brahmo Samaj, a monotheistic reformist movement within Hinduism. He compiled a controversial book, Precepts of Jesus: The Guide to Peace and Happiness. Extracted from the Books of the New Testament, Ascribed to Four Evangelists. He tried to extract the "purest principles of morality" (p. 76) from the Gospels and weeded out "genealogies, historical incidents, biographical details, supernatural events, miraculous stories, and doctrinal teachings" (p. 87). The moralistic image of Jesus which Roy presents is "full of dullness and moral platitudes" (p. 38), as Sugirtharajah mentions in The Bible and Empire (Cambridge, 2005). What is important to understand is Roy's reformist spirit. He did not criticize the Bible itself. Rather, he criticized the interpretation of the Bible by European missionaries. He also attacked the lack of the observance of the Golden rule by the missionaries who failed to respect the religion of the Hindus. The missionaries lacked the very spirit of Jesus, who left the famous words, "do unto others as you would wish to be done by" (Luke, 6:31). Thus Roy used the Christian text itself to protest against imperialist-missionary ideology. Roy waged endless battles not only with Christian missionaries but also with his own Brahmin pundits. He tried to rediscover monotheistic elements in Hindu texts. His criticism of the Christian dogma of the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus was in line with his pursuit of the real Hinduism with a monotheistic tinge. In the words of Monier Williams, Roy was "the first earnest-minded investigator of comparative religion that the world has produced" (p. 85).

In Chapter 4, "A Buddhist Ascetic and His Maverick Misreadings of the Bible," Sugirtharajah critically presents the interpretation of the Bible by Anagarika Dharmapala. Dharmapala was a Buddhist revivalist in Sri Lanka. He was educated at Christian schools and began to question the Bible at an early age. Dharmapala did not totally deny the significance of Christianity. Rather, he deemed it his task to reform Christianity. Although "the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount" who taught "forgiveness and indifference to the things of the world" can be commended, Jesus was basically an unoriginal "ethical reformer" who taught a "hotch potch mixture of Judaism, Brahmanism, and Buddhism" (pp. 130-31). Just as European colonialism tried to civilize the Orient through Christianity, Dharmapala hoped to enlighten Western Christians by Buddhist truth. The survival of Christianity hinged on its recovering "the essential principles of Buddhism - self-reliance, renunciation of sensual passions, freedom from dogmas, and good deeds" (p. 150). Dharmapala is interpreted by Sugirtharajah as a complicated figure who interiorized the spirit of colonialism and orientalism to confront European colonialism and orientalism.

Chapter 5, "Paul the Roman in Asia," investigates the place of Paul in the colonial-missionary context. There is the famous advice of Paul, "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good" (Thessalonians, 5:21). Max Müller employed this advice "to urge missionaries not to prejudge the various religious texts they encountered, but to study the Koran of the Mohammedans, the Zend Avesta of the Parsees, the Vedas of the Brahmins, the Tripitaka of the Buddhists, the Sutras of the Jains, the Ch'un-ts'ew of the Confucians, and the Tao Te Ching of the Taoists" (p. 159). Thus, the text of Paul was used to advise missionaries to respect Asian religions and to be careful in distinguishing what is valuable from what is false in Asian textual traditions. On the other hand, Paul's letters were seen to be practically relevant to Indians because Paul was seen to have been tackling the issues which had long preoccupied India. According to Arthur Crosthwaite, those issues were "the significance of suffering, the relation between the spiritual and the material, between God and men, and the place and character of asceticism" (p. 160). The texts of Paul were able to have new dimensions in connection with the Asian multi-religious milieu.

In Chapter 6, "Exegesis in Eastern Climes," Sugirtharajah tries to catch forgotten and overlooked minority voices in Asia: Minjung (people) theology in South Korea, Teruo Kuribayashi's attempt to find the starting point of Christology in the pursuit of liberation and freedom of Burakumin (Japanese outcastes), Dalit (Indian outcastes) theology by Maria Arul Raja and Surekha Nelavala, Asian feminist theology by the Japanese scholar Satoko Yamaguchi, Hisako Kinukawa and Vietnamese American Mai-Anh-Le Tran. Sugirtharajah names those attempts "marginal readings" (p. 198). By paying attention to such marginal readings, Sugirtharajah tries to correct the general tendency of Asian theologians who "were articulating a theology for the whole of Asia and in the process ignoring the concerns of their own doubly oppressed" (p. 9).

Chapter 7, "Between the Lines of Asian Fiction," treats the influence of the Bible on Asian literature. Many novelists from various Asian countries are discussed in this chapter. Sarah Joseph's novel Othappu in Malayalam, World and Town by Chinese American novelist Gish Jen, Touch Me Not by Filipino novelist José Rizal, Book of Rachel, Book of Esther, and Shalom India Housing Society by Jewish-Indian novelist Esther David, What News, Pilate?, by Paul Zacharia, a novelist from Kerala in India, Yellow Man by Japanese novelist Shusaku Endo, Son by Chinese American novelist Yiyun Li, and Lord Krishna by Asian-American novelist Rishi Reddi who was born in India. Sugirtharajah pays attention to the fact that the Bible is "often used to critique the institutionalized church and Western colonialism" (p. 10) in these novels.

As is clear from the above, Sugirtharajah treats so many topics in this book that the description of each topic is sometimes quite sketchy. But it is not necessarily a shortcoming of the book. Sugirtharajah does not try to develop a unified theory concerning the relationship between the Bible and Asia. Rather, he picks up various voices which were hitherto rarely heard in mainstream Christian theologies.

The key concept of this book is the concept of "reading." According to Sugirtharajah, "one of the critical questions that Asian Christians face is how to respond to the presence of many scriptural traditions in Asia" (p. 190). There is a need for a strategy for the "employment of the Bible in a multireligious context" (p. 190). Sugirtharajah presents three new "reading strategies" which have been introduced by Asian theologians. The first reading strategy is "symbiotic reading" (p. 191) suggested by Aloysius Pieris. The second strategy is "cross-textual reading" (p. 193) advocated by Archie Lee. The third strategy is "the contrapuntal method of reading advocated by postcolonial interpreters" (p. 194).

The most illuminating strategy is that of Pieris. According to Pieris, "a seminal teaching in the Scriptures of one religion, sown and buried in the texts, when exposed to the warm light that comes from the teachings of another religion's Sacred Writ, sprouts forth and grows into a fruitful source of new insights" (p. 192). By being exposed to the scripture of another religion, a scripture can reveal new meanings which have remained implicit in it. In such a reading, the basic teaching of neither religion is compromised. Rather, new aspects of each scripture shine forth in the mirror of another scripture and the coexistence of plural textual traditions is maintained. That is why it is called "symbiotic" reading.

Demographically speaking, the center of Christianity is moving from Europe and North America to South America, Africa and Asia. Sugirtharajah relocates the Bible in the midst of the various and heterogeneous textual traditions in Asia. He does not attempt to engender a local interpretation of the Bible proper to Asia. Rather, he gives the readers various seeds of contemplation by which a new universal understanding of the Bible can bloom as a cross-pollination between the Bible and Asia.