Of the lost fold

China has not been the most open about religion over the past few decades with the Communist party.  In fact, when the Communist party came to power, religion was stamped out of the heart of the people. Eventually the government has allowed religious freedom, but Christianity has struggled to regain its place among these people because of the limited permission from the government on religious activity and absolutely no proselyting among the Chinese nationals.  Throughout my study of Chinese I have come across a few instances where I can see the Christian influence show through.  The two instances that I am going to focus on are within the written language.

In the MTC we were chatting about the influence of Christianity on the Chinese people.  This point was illustrated through the character 船(Chuán, boat). Each character is a combination of radicals (a selection of 214 characters) that give meaning to the word.  In the case of 船there are 3 of these characters that made up this word.  The first gives meaning to the word, 舟 (zhōu) meaning boat by itself.  They could have stopped at this point but they kept adding to it.  Now the second character, I have recently questioned on which character it really is, but the character that we heard it was is 八 (bā) apparently is sometimes written like it is in 船 , which means 8.  The last part is 口 (kōu), which means mouth and is also a measure word for people. Now knowing all of these parts of the character, what does this sound like? To be specific, what even in the bible does this character seem to stem from?  Were there not 8 people on the ark that Noah built? This is just one instance that I have seen. 

The second influence that I have seen I discovered while I was here in China.  It is the character 基 (jī). I discovered this as I was studying my vocabulary for the chapter.  I was looking through the word 基础(jīchū) stood out to me.  基础means foundation, base, or basis.  This caught my attention because it is the same 基that is in 耶稣基督(yēsū jīdū) meaning Jesus Christ.  Now this struck my interest because we say that Jesus Christ is the foundation on which Christianity is built upon, so I looked up what 基meant by itself and it is the same, foundation.  Seeing this I looked up what the rest of 耶稣基督 meant.  耶is a character used in 耶和华 (yēhéhuà) meaning Jehova or the Old testament God. 稣has the same meaning as 苏 (sū) which can mean revive, to come back to life.  As we know Jesus died for our sins and was resurrected, or brought back to life.  督 means superintend, direct, which as we also know that the only way to return back to our Heavenly Father is through Christ.  So Jesus Christ in Chinese looking at the different individual characters is the Jehovah, brought back to life, who is the foundation, and direct (was back to Heavenly Father).   Now I know that I find this because I was looking for it, but even so, this is a testament to me that China was once a very religious society and has a large Christian basis to it.

My hope for the people of China is that eventually they will turn back to their religious roots and accept the Gospel of Christ.  Having taught these people on my mission it would make me happy to see China be open to missionary work and to be able to attend church with the people I love.  In due time it will happen, but hopefully it will happen within my lifetime.