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The Rewriting of Jesus Christ: From the Saviour to the Proletarian – A Comparative Study of Zhu Weizhi´s Jesus Christ and Jesus the Proletarian

In: Asian and African Studies, vol. 25, no. 2
Yan Liu

Details:

Year, pages: 2016, 173 - 190
Keywords:
Jesus Christ, the Saviour, proletarian, postcolonial resistance, indigenous theology
About article:
Zhu Weizhi, a Chinese Christian scholar, published his book Christianity and Literature in 1940, one of the first in China to study the relationship between Christianity and literature. However, it is not so well known that he also published two biographies of Jesus Christ: Jesus Christ in 1948 and Jesus the Proletarian in 1950. In these two biographies, Zhu had very different opinions about Jesus who was changed from the Son of God or the Saviour to a son of the working class. Jesus is here described as a proletarian or a revolutionary after the founding of New China in 1949. By doing so Zhu tried to make his faith appropriate to Marxism and the socialist ideology of the day. This paper will attempt to explore the apparent ‘need’ for a rewriting of the Jesus narrative by Christian intellectuals around this period of Chinese history in order to discover whether this rewriting was prompted by old traditional Chinese cultural mores which arguably could be described as being non-Christian and non-Western in their spiritual and political outlooks? Or indeed was it due to widespread anxiety about the fate of the Chinese nation whose postcolonial visions of a new Utopian society compelled ‘Chinese Christianity’ to make adaptive changes more suitable to the ‘New China’. These and other relevant questions will be explored in this article.
How to cite:
ISO 690:
Liu, Y. 2016. The Rewriting of Jesus Christ: From the Saviour to the Proletarian – A Comparative Study of Zhu Weizhi´s Jesus Christ and Jesus the Proletarian. In Asian and African Studies, vol. 25, no.2, pp. 173-190. 1335-1257.

APA:
Liu, Y. (2016). The Rewriting of Jesus Christ: From the Saviour to the Proletarian – A Comparative Study of Zhu Weizhi´s Jesus Christ and Jesus the Proletarian. Asian and African Studies, 25(2), 173-190. 1335-1257.