The Missionary Strategy of "Christian-Confucian Synthesis" From the Perspective of Fiction Annotation of Sheng lü jing cheng (Pilgrim's Progress)
Author: LAI Tsz Pang John, Assistant Professor, Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Abstract:
The Pilgrim`s Progress by John Bunyan (1628-1688) has been printed and translated more than any book other than the Bible since its publication in 1678. This Christian literary classic was first introduced to the Chinese world as early as 1851. Among more than ten Chinese translations published in the last decades of imperial China, Sheng lü jing cheng (1870) rendered by Thomas Hall Hudson (1800-1876), of the General Baptist Missionary Society, constitutes an extremely rare yet academically invaluable version. Demonstrating a remarkably domesticating approach of translation, Shenglü jingcheng adopts the literary form and narrative features of traditional Chinese fiction. More prominently, it inherits the literary tradition of fiction annotation to interpret the Christian thought of the text by making profuse references to traditional Chinese religious and philosophical concepts, especially from the Confucian classics. This paper attempts to investigate the missionary strategy of Christian-Confucian synthesis from the perspective of fiction annotation of Sheng lü jing cheng.
Keywords:
Sheng lü jing cheng (Pilgrim’s Progress), missionary translation, fiction annotation, Christian-Confucian synthesis
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