Saeki sees evidence of Buddhist translators in some documents, and Taoists in others. The
translators may have inserted passages that did not reflect the teachings of the authors.
Secondly, missionaries often take pictures and phrases from the religious vocabulary of
heathens, and use them in contrast to the true teaching. Paul was not reluctant to use Stoic
and Epicurean vocabulary, or to speak of "The Unknown God" to the Athenians, and John
used the philosophical term Logos to describe Christ. Was not Alopen free to do the same?
Also, one repeatedly finds accurate statements of Christian doctrine in these same
documents. The Jesus-Messiah sutra states that "the Messiah gave up his body to these
wicked men to be sacrificed for the sake of all mankind...." (198). The Monotheism text
states that "all things are made by the one God" (5), and that "the one Godhead begot the
other one [Jesus] out of one and the same substance..." (42). In The Oneness of the Ruler of
the Universe we read that "when heaven and earth shall pass away....all the dead shall rise
again" (68), and that the Messiah "bore all the sins of mankind, and for them he suffered the
punishment himself; no meritorious deed is necessary [for salvation]" (136-137). The
Almsgiving text gives an extensive description of Christ's death and resurrection and quotes
several complete verses from Isaiah 53. And the stele says "the true Lord....took human
form, and through him, salvation was made free to all; the Sun arising, the darkness ending."
If this is a "radical Taoist-Christianity", we have nothing to worry about.
There is one final missiological question that needs adressing, but not by me. Which aspects
of the message we find in the scrolls were due to missiological decision-making, and which
to the Nestorian roots of the missionaries. Theology does affect missiology. Pelliot, Saeki
and Palmer were all at home in Taoism. But to answer this question we need impartial
scholars who are at home in both Nestorian Christian culture, vocabulary, doctrine and
practice and Tang dynasty Chinese culture and language. Only then will we have a clear
picture of either the theological intricacies or the missiological decision-making process of
these early missionaries to China.
III. Conclusion: The decline of Christianity in China
The path of Christianity was not smooth even under the imperial patronage of the 7
nuns to "return to their secular life and cease to confuse our national customs and manners."
Christianity began to wane, but we do not know at what rate. The Arabic writer Abu Sayd
states that Christians were among the 120,000 people massacred at Canton in 878. As we
have seen, the Book of Praise sutra was composed in the 10
still to be found and thought worth preserving. Someone also painted a Christian figure on
one of the cave walls. Further north near the present border of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan two
Nestorian graveyards were discovered in 1885. 610 Nestorian tombs with crosses and Syriac