[Review：The Origin of Christianity]There are one subject and two conclusions in your book. The subject is the elements of Buddhism in Christianity.
One of the conclusions is aim to unify Christianity and Buddhism through determining the elements of Buddhism in Christianity.
The other is to eliminate dispute among nations enhancing religious harmony among peoples of the world.
The second conclusion is based on the assumption of the first conclusion. This kind of argument very tests readers' acceptability.
Therefore I recommend that you should integrate the part one, the part two and the part three into a central theme of "Aim to achieve ultimate peace and unity of the world from the Buddhist elements in the origin of Christianity."
Tian Tian Xiang Shang (Day Day Up)
[Reply]
Thank you very much for your analysis in detail. This book has not completed. I would like to explore the headwaters of Christianity together with readers of this book.
If you go up to the stream, you may find so many tributaries. It seems that many messianisms which had been formed among the Jewish newcomers in Western Asia and the Mediterranean coastal cities, such as Alexandria and Tarsus, fused together in Jesus' era and Christianity was born.
Originally Judaism seems to have been written and preached in Hebrew. However, Aramaic came to be used as a common language in the surrounding area of Palestine in the wake of that Hasmonean built a unified multi-ethnic country including the Edomites, Moabites, Ammonites, Amorites, Phoenician and Greeks etc. Jesus too appears to have preached in Aramaic.
On the other hand, after the Old Testament was translated into Greek in Alexandria, a great number of Jewish newcomers, who only knew the Old Testament written in Greek, appeared in the coastal area of Mediterranean Sea.
Thus at a time when Jesus came out, Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek seem to have been used as intermediary languages of Judaism in Judea (especially surrounding area of Jerusalem), throughout Palestine except Judea and the coastal area of Mediterranean Sea respectively.
We can infer that qualitative changes also occurred in Judaism itself, along with the change of its intermediary languages. For example, a word "faith", which is used in English New Testament, it means that a believer, as a servant, swears allegiance to God or Christ as his lord. This word is written as "信仰" in both the Chinese and Japanese bible. However the above meaning of "faith" is some what different from the original meaning of "信仰" in Chinese and in Japanese but similar to the meaning of "忠誠" or "忠恕" in Confucianism. It may be due to the New Testament was translated into English in the era of formation of Feudal system in Europe.
According to Takao Murakawa, a publisher of Christian mail magazines in Japan, "faith" is "pistis" and "believe" is "pisteuein" in Greek respectively. And the translations in English of pistis are "trust", "faith", "belief", "faithfulness", "honesty", "assurance" and "pledge" etc.
By the way, in Malaysia, which belongs to the Islamic world, traditionally Christians also seem to have used "Allah" as a designation of God. However, recently, a court of the country is said to have banned for religious organizations other than Islam using the word of "Allah" as a designation of God because it is the privilege of the Muslim to use the word of "Allah" as a designation of God.
Incidentally author of the Gospel of John calls the people who did not accept the teachings of Jesus "Jews". It seems that he thought he and other followers of Jesus (probably Galileans) were non-Jews.
According to what I heard, the Old Testament's original text is Hebrew version and the New Testament's original text is Greek version. If so, it also indicates that Gentile (non-circumcision) Judaism is the origin of Christianity.
Atsushi Murakami
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