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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....