Book review: The Bible and Asia, by R.S. Sugirtharajah
Packed churches this month suggest there might be more to the meaning of Christmas than shopping in Hong Kong.
by R.S. Sugirtharajah
Harvard University Press
3 stars
William Wadsworth
Packed churches this month suggest there might be more to the meaning of Christmas than shopping in Hong Kong. So it's a pity that Sri Lankan-born academic R.S. Sugirtharajah rarely mentions the city's 843,000-strong Christian population, or its historic role as a regional evangelising centre in his latest book, The Bible and Asia.
Instead of explaining why the Christian word is accepted by some Asian cultures and rejected in others, the emeritus professor of Biblical Hermeneutics at the University of Birmingham in Britain has written a broadly titled, loosely bound collection of academic essays on largely Indocentric pet subjects.
Even so, Sugirtharajah draws lay readers into a debate about some of the Bible's origins. Its word was largely spread from the Holy Land to its imperial capital, Rome, and the West, he says, yet the Bible shows West Asia was also connected to India by ancient trade routes. Sugirtharajah cites evidence of this in the Seleucid king Antiochus' Indian war mahouts in the Books of the Maccabees, and the Queen of Sheba's gems and spices in the Book of Kings. He also reveals how King Solomon's almug harps might have been exported from Mysore via Gujarat to Arabia.
Indian wisdom and folk tales also probably reached the Mediterranean along such trade routes, Sugirtharajah says. Yet he doesn't take sides when he leads a debate into whether parts of the Bible might also have originated in Asia. Instead, he shows impressive scholarship in revealing how biblical staples, such as the Judgment of Solomon and Jesus' telling of an adulteress to "sin no more", have plot similarities with older Buddhist texts.
He also leaves readers to debate for themselves the potential links between Tamil love poetry and the Song of Solomon; and to evaluate the studies of two India-based colonials, the 19th-century Frenchman Louis Jacolliot, and his 18th-century British counterpart John Holwell, who felt the Bible was inspired by Brahmanical texts. Jacolliot, for example, noted the similarities of Krishna and Jesus' virgin births, and how the anointing of the Jews "was the revival of the story of Nichidali and Sarasvati".