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Stones indicate earlier Christian link?
By Wang Shanshan (China Daily)
Updated: 2005-12-22 06:34 "Another one depicted a woman taking fruit from 'the tree of knowledge of
good and evil' and a snake biting her right sleeve," Wang said. "It also
included the angel sent by God to guard the tree. That's similar to the 'Eve
Tricked by the Serpent' story in the Bible."
The professor thought at first it was Judaism in which the owner of the tomb
possibly believed, but what he saw in two of the stones changed everything.
"There were four fishermen in the picture," Wang said of an image in the
eighth stone. "It reminded me of the story in the New Testament about Peter,
Andrew, James and John, (four of Jesus' disciples) who were all fishermen."
And in the sixth stone, a woman and man are sitting around what looks like a
manger, with three men approaching from the left side, holding gifts, and other
men queued up, kneeling, on the right. In that scene, Wang said he saw the first
Christmas.
The bas-reliefs followed the artistic style of early Christianity in the
Middle East, Wang said.
"Some have decorative designs of the Arabic number 8, formed by two rare
animals crossing their necks. They were almost the same as designs on Uruk oval
seals found in the Euphrates River and Tigris River valleys in the Middle East,"
he said.
Scholars agree that the date of the tomb is in the mid-to late Han Dynasty
period, which could be anywhere from about AD 100 to 220. And it seems equally
clear that the aristocrat buried in it commissioned artisans to carve the
scenes.
But could he have been a Christian?
If Wang's suspicions are right, the time of Christianity's arrival in China
could be as early as the end of the 1st century, more than 500 years before the
widely recognized date.
However, Wang's opinion is opposed by a number of Chinese historians,
archaeologists and other scholars.
Christian history
Historians currently believe that Christianity had been introduced to China
by the middle of the 7th century.
In evidence is a stone stele, about 2.75 metres tall, bearing inscriptions
about an AD 635 meeting between a Nestorian Christian monk named Alopen from
Syria and Chinese Emperor Taizong (599-649) of the Tang Dynasty (618-907).
The stele, excavated in 1625 in Xi'an, capital of Northwest China's Shaanxi
Province, documented Taizong's approval to spread Christianity. Xi'an, called
Chang'an in the Tang era, was the capital of one of the most open and prosperous
dynasties in Chinese history.
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