Alexander Beecroft - The Roads to Damascus and Hanoi...

The Roads to Damascus and Hanoi: Conversion and Cosmopolitanism in the New Testament and the Mouzi Lihuolun
Wednesday, February 11, 2015 5-6:30 pm

This is the fourth talk in the series Conversion and Religious Transformation: Ancient and Modern Experiences and Paradigms

In the middle of the first century AD, a Pharisee from Asia Minor, Paul the Apostle, writes in koinê Greek to the emergent Christian community in Rome, citing passages from the Psalms and Deuteronomy to do so. About a century later, a Chinese intellectual, known to us as Master Mou, living in exile in what is now Hanoi during the collapse of the Han dynasty, writes a Treatise on Removing Doubts (牟子理惑論), which uses quotations from the by-then canonical Confucian classics to advance the Buddhist cause. Both men, in other words, use an existing cosmopolitan literary language to promote a universalist religion whose origins lie outside the languages in which they write. Paul, by citing his texts in Greek, is able to re-orient them from their original Israelite audience to the larger world of the Roman empire, while Master Mou domesticates the alien Buddhist tradition with reference to Chinese texts. Using these two roughly-contemporaneous conversion narratives as a starting-point, this talk explores the process of conversion as inherently cosmopolitan, occupying a space in transition between competing worldviews.

Alexander Beecroft, Classics and Comparative Literature, University
of South Carolina

Видео Alexander Beecroft - The Roads to Damascus and Hanoi... канала Green College UBC