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Influence, Translation, and Parallels: Selected Studies on the Bible in China, by Marián Gálik. Monumenta Serica Institute, Sankt Augustin. Steyler Verlag, Nettetal 2004. 351pp. EUR 48.00 (Paperback). ISBN 3-8050-0489-3
For the first time in my life I visited a church in Chongqing in 1988, and I obtained my first copy of the Bible in 1996. Nanjing is where the Jinling Union Theological Seminary is located. The personal contact with the Chinese converts made me aware that there were people around me who believed in God. I believed I had some acquaintance with the JudaeoChristian heritage and its influence in China, until I came across Marián Gálik's book Influence, Translation and Parallels: Selected Studies on the Bible in China. The work informed me that the Bible had assumed a position in the intellectual life of China long ago and had already enkindled much literary creativity.
Author and editor of numerous books on modern literature, Marián Gálik collects in this volume his seventeen essays on Sino-Biblical literary studies, which, according to Irene Eber in the Introduction, form "a panoramic view of the Bible's function in fiction, drama, poetry and, especially, the many different ways in which authors have appropriated the biblical text." The book is divided into two parts. The essays in the first part generally review the reception of the Bible in China and translations of it into Chinese, and range from discussions on the achievement and frustration of the Jesuit Fathers in the late Ming and the early Qing Dynasties, the unexpected success of the fundamentalist Protestants in the Taiping tianguo (Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace) in the 1850s,...