Early Christianity
For a guy that doesn’t like to read it seems that I do a lot of it. In my Saturday and Sunday morning reading I ran across this article on The Christian Century, website that reports on scholarship looking into the global nature of early Christianity and the possible influence of Buddhism, and other religions, on Christian communities and writings. A couple of paragraphs posted here. Click the title to read more.
Jesus Meets the Buddha
by Phillip Jenkins | “Notes from the Global Church” / The Christian Century | Aug. 30, 2012A proverb that circulated in the former Soviet Union held that the future stays much the same but the past changes from day to day. Less cynically, we might say that as a society develops, people naturally develop interests in new historical topics, and academics turn their attention to these emerging issues. In the case of Christianity, the growth of churches outside the traditional West has led to an upsurge of scholarship about the early histories of African and Asian Christianity, and these histories are being written with the fresh eyes of writers from those regions.
The whole Epistle of James has attracted Asian thinkers. In his classic Water Buffalo Theology, Kosuke Koyama cited James as the most promising means of introducing Christianity to Southeast Asians, especially to Buddhists, who would feel immediately at home with its style of writing as much as its teachings. This is, he notes, just what popular Buddhist scriptures look and sound like. Asian wisdom literature sounds a lot like Judeo-Christian wisdom literature, including James but also Thomas. The Dalai Lama himself is no less enthusiastic about James, praising James’s declaration that human beings are a mist, a vapor that rises and vanishes away. What a wonderful image, he says, for the transience of human life!