Jesus meets the Buddha

A 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.

Ever since Westerners discovered Asian cultures in the 19th century they have been intrigued by possible relationships between the two great transnational faiths, Christianity and Buddhism. In 1916, George Moore’s best-selling novel The Brook Kerith portrayed a Jesus who survived the crucifixion only to recoil from the preaching of the emerging Pauline church and eventually join a group of Buddhist monks evangelizing the Judean countryside. Many other books through the years have presented pseudo-scholarship of varying degrees of wackiness, regularly presenting a Jesus who acquires sacred wisdom in various corners of the mystic Orient.

Such speculations should not for a second be confused with the solidly grounded work on Christian history and thought that has emerged from modern-day scholars who seek to give a theological basis to the Asian churches which have grown so powerfully over the past generation. Asians represent one-seventh of all Christian believers, and that number is growing mightily. Naturally, those people want to understand the Asian contexts and origins of their faith, and scholars are seeking to accommodate them.