Christianity in Tang China: Texts and People

Christianity-jingjiao along with Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism is one of the so-called ‘three barbarian teachings’ san yi jiao, which were introduced in mediaeval China almost simultaneously. All three teachings were able to adapt to the Chinese cultural and socio-political milieu and became part of the Chinese religious and cultural landscape. The fragmentary character of the Chinese jingjiao documents, which were found in Dunhuang, and a very obscure social and political status of this doctrine, however, make it very complicated and difficult to reconstruct the place of jingjiao in mediaeval Chinese society as much as its ideological and doctrinal features because of the vast absorption of the Taoist and Buddhist elements. Such an obscure and very ‘fuzzy’ character of this teaching makes its impact on studies resulting in highly improbable and erroneous conclusions. In this paper, an attempt has been made to classify periodically the steps in the studies of the Tang China jingjiao phenomenon, highlighting three basic periods in it, to characterize each of them and to single out the most important authors and their works and to pose or re-formulate some questions, which can appear in the process of the investigation of this problematic religious teaching, e.g. linguistic and philological problems, including textological and palaeographical ones; problems of historical context, given the wide cultural and political aspects of Tang China’s connections with Sasanian Iran and Silk Road states; questions of ethnic and religious identity, which seems to be very ambiguous matter; problems of decline and disappearance of jingjiao in later period.