The following information will probably be new to most readers.
And may be considered too fantastic to consider. However, I have checked it with Japanese friends who vouch for its reasonableness. And several missionaries have made use of it in teaching in China and Japan. I spent 15 years in Japan myself, and have a son who has been there as a missionary for a similar length of time. He is knowledgeable in the language, and introduced me to the book. I have submitted this to this forum before, but didn’t get much comment. Would appreciate hearing from you.
It concerns a book entitled “The Discovery of Genesis in the Chinese Language” by C.H. Kang and Ethel R. Nelson, published by Concordia in St. Louis. It has been called possibly “one of the most startling discoveries of the ages.”
C.H. Kang was a minister of the Gospel in China. He had always held his belief in the Bible with a simple unquestioning faith until challenged one day by a lady in a hospital where, as a chaplain, he was distributing copies of Genesis. “It is a very fine fairy tale for children,” a puzzled Chinese lady told him, “but hardly worth an adult’s time.” She proceeded to let him know that educated people believe in the evolutionary theory of origins.
Mr. Kang was embarrassed that at that time he had little scientific persuasive evidence to support his faith. In the West we have abundant references to help us, and need not fear a challenge to our faith. But what could he find in pagan China!? Then he remembered a note in a Mandarin text which started him on a 40 year study of the origins of his own Chinese language.
The Chinese written language is the only picture language still in use. It is used by more than a billion people, a quarter of the earth’s population. Japan borrowed the characters, retaining much the same meanings but, of course, giving them Japanese pronunciations. There are thousands of characters, so many that no one knows the total count. Since World War II the Japanese government has established a limiting set of 2000 characters which, with two syllable alphabets of about 50 characters each are the only ones authorized for public use.
These characters are called PICTOGRAPHS or “picture writing”, and where simple concrete things are contemplated it is easy enough to see how they originated. A man or a person is a simple two stroke figure, like an inverted “Y”. The sun is a ball. The moon is a crescent, and looks remarkably like the moon in its final quarter. The oldest texts were rather freely drawn, but eventually the Chinese government formalized them into the squared form they have today.
To picture abstract concepts the ancient Chinese produced what we now call IDEOGRAPHS, or “idea writing”. To illustrate, if we were doing it today, we might represent the word for “honesty” by using the familiar story of George Washington who, as a boy, cut down his father’s cherry tree with his new hatchet. When confronted he said, “I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little hatchet.” We might draw a picture of a tree and an axe to represent honesty.
Five thousand years from now the story of George Washington would probably not be known. But the character might still be used and learned simply by rote. That is how Chinese and Japanese learn their language today. They do not question its origins, just as we don’t know why our letters are shaped the way they are.
But Mr. Kang remembered that the word for “ship” consists of three parts or “radicals”. One is a picture of a small craft, a boat with a sail and two sailors. To the right of this is the Chinese figure for “8” (eight) and the figure for “mouth”. In many characters the “mouth” radical or root means one able to speak, not an animal. So eight people on a boat made it a large boat, a ship! He remembered the story of Noah’s ark in which Noah, his wife, his three sons, and their wives, 8 people in all, were saved! That would have been the largest “boat” the ancient Chinese could have known about. Could they have used other stories, familiar to us from the early pages of Genesis? He began to search.
Mr. Kang wrote down the character for “create”, and was astonished as he analyzed it. It contains the radicals or roots for “dust” or “mud”, “mouth”, and “able to walk”. A small jot called a “p’ieh” next to the dust means “life or motion”. The text in Genesis 2:7 came to his mind. “Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being,” (not a baby but an adult, able to walk and talk!)
Studies indicate that the written Chinese language originated about 2500 B.C. This would be close to the time, about 2300 B.C., which was the estimated date for the dispersion of the races from the Tower of Babel as recorded in the Bible. (Genesis 11). If this were true, the stories most familiar to the ancient Chinese would be those we have recorded in the first eleven chapters of Genesis, stories they had heard from their parents and grandparents. They could not have gotten them from the Hebrew Bible because it had not been written at that time.
I am leaving out a great deal of the story which is told in this little book. But Mr. Kang continued to study the characters and found many which, when broken down into their roots suggests very strongly that the ancient Chinese were familiar with the story of Eden and the fall of man. For example, the word for “devil”, a word still used today, consists of four parts, a person (with the little mark which indicates life), a garden or cultivated field, and a character which means secret or hidden.
This character in turn is part of a larger character which means “tempter”. Broken down it means “secret”, “man or person”, “garden”, “alive”, (together meaning devil), plus two “trees”, (suggesting the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, as described in the Bible) and “cover”, (suggesting hiding).
There are dozens, perhaps a hundred or so, examples in this book. Some which stood out for me were the character for “West” — “first”, “man”, standing in a “garden or field”. West was the direction from China of the Garden of Eden where the first man stood. This figure, combined with the figure for a woman, means “want or need”. The man, in the garden in the west, needed a woman. God gave Eve to him.
One interesting character, which is also a root in many more complex characters, is the word for “fire”. It is the character for “man”, but with flames coming from him. This character appears in the character for “converse”, where there is a “mouth”, lines suggesting words, and two “shining people”. It is suggested that as God dwells in light, as a garment, so Adam and Eve, before they sinned, were clothed in light.
This interpretation might well be questioned if it were not for the fact that the two “shining people” appear in a number of complex characters. The word for “glory” is composed of two such characters standing over the character for “cover” with a “tree” below, suggesting Adam and Eve in their sinless state having access to or privilege over the tree of life.
There is another interesting character for “garden”. It consists of the roots for “dirt”, “person” and a “mouth” inside a rectangle, suggesting a man made of dirt with ability to speak, (Adam?), and with ANOTHER PERSON COMING FROM HIS SIDE! It suggests the Bible story of how Eve was created from a rib taken from Adam’s side.
Someone might well ask why the Chinese and Japanese themselves have not noticed this before. First, Chinese and Japanese learn their written language by rote, and do not usually ask why it is the way it is. Secondly, recognizing the relationships requires a knowledge of the Bible stories. There aren’t many in Japan and China with such a background who might be inclined to search out such an unexpected relationship.
If there were only a few such characters, or the relationships were not so clear, we might well question it all. But it is very difficult to imagine how they might have come up with these ideographs unless they knew the stories we have recorded in our Bible.
This sort of evidence is not given to “prove” that the Bible is true. It is supportive only, but it strongly suggests that the Bible stories are more than mere fables.
I have shown these things to a number of my Japanese friends, and they are favorably impressed. One Japanese Christian lady said to me, “We had always considered Christianity as a ‘foreign’ religion. Now we see that we are closer to the beginning of the story than you are!”
Bill Carrell