Cultural clashes and doctrinal negotiations: Jesuit translations of the Ten Commandments in late Ming and early Qing catechisms

Upon their arrival in foreign lands, one of the Jesuits’ first endeavours was the composition of the so-called essential catechisms, which aimed to introduce core ethical norms, rituals and the liturgical aspects of Catholicism to the populace in plain language, to allow even the less educated strata of a society to become familiar with its teachings. While drawing most of the structure, content and dialogic format from pre-existing European catechisms, Jesuit translators made skilful use of the question-answer format to present and explain some of the relevant precepts of Christianity to their readers, while providing linguistic or doctrinal clarifications of some of the most controversial aspects. This paper proposes to examine Jesuit narrative and discourse building in three of the Ten Commandments (Shijie 十誡), taken from a corpus of seventeenth century essential catechisms. By investigating the translation and rhetorical strategies employed in texts such as João da Rocha’s (1566 – 1623) Tianzhu shengjiao qimeng 天主聖教啟蒙 (Primer of the Holy Christian doctrine, 1619), Francesco Brancati’s (1607 – 1671) Tianshen hui ke 天神會課 (Lessons for the Congregation of Angels, 1661), as well as other coeval catechisms, this study will discuss how Jesuit translators addressed a number of aspects of local culture that were incompatible with the Catholic religion, highlighting their cultural understating, agency as authors and role as “servants of two masters”, i.e. the Roman authorities and the late-Ming readership.