In a Dark Time … The Eye Begins to See

Although I’m still impatient to get to the actual Jesus Sutras, I found Palmer’s three middle chapters, “Panorama of the Early Christian World,” “The Church of the East,” and “The Multicultural World of Seventh-Century China” much more interesting than I would ever have expected, perhaps because they made me more aware of my vast ignorance [...]

Most of the Jesus Sutras I’ve read so far in Palmer’s book certainly haven’t been as interesting as The Gospel of Thomas was. In fact, the early versions Palmer discusses first seem little more than poor translations of Western versions. Though it is interesting to see how hard it is to translate ideas [...]

I am certainly no religious expert, and I’m not sure whether Palmer is right when he argues that: Jingjing should be recognized as a Dharma King: a saint. One of the most outstanding Christians ever produced by China, he is also, to the best of our limited knowledge, the greatest product of the Tang Dynasty [...]

Palmer ends his book with a translation of the Stone Sutra that inspired his search for Da Qin and a brief history of the Christian Church in China, both of which proved quite interesting. I was especially impressed by the opening lines of the Stone Sutra where the author restates Genesis and accounts for Man’s [...]