The Gospel According to Marxism: Zhu Weizhi and the Making of Jesus the Proletarian (1950)

Abstract

This article explores the integration of Marxism into the Gospel narratives of the Christian Bible in Zhu Weizhi’s Jesus the Proletarian (1950). It argues that Zhu in this Chinese Life of Jesus refashioned a Gospel according to Marxism, with a proletarian Jesus at its center, by creatively appropriating a wealth of global sources regarding historical Jesus and primitive Christianity. Zhu’s rewriting of Jesus can be appreciated as a precursor to the later Latin American liberation Christology.

1. Introduction

In recent decades, scholarly attention has been increasingly paid to Chinese intellectuals’ rewriting in the early twentieth century of the Gospel narratives of the Christian Bible (Ni 2011; Wang 2014, 2017a, 2017b, 2019; Starr 2016; Chin 2018). Among these intellectuals—Zhao Zichen (T. C. Chao, 1888–1979), Wu Leichuan (L. C. Wu, 1870–1944), Zhang Shizhang (Hottinger S. C. Chang, b. 1896), etc.—stands out Zhu Weizhi (W. T. Chu, 1905–1999), who in addition to being first and foremost a preeminent literary scholar, also devoted himself within no more than two years to the recasting of two very different Lives of Jesus, one in 1948 and another 1950. Entitled Yesu jidu (Jesus Christ) and Wuchan zhe yesu zhuan (Jesus the Proletarian) respectively, these two biographies of Jesus (particularly the latter one) have drawn attention from scholars of various disciplinary backgrounds (Gálik 2007; Chin 2015; Liu 2016).

Having recognized some foreign influences on Zhu’s composing of Jesus the Proletarian, however, scholars did not probe sufficiently into the extent to which he borrowed from global sources as follows regarding historical Jesus and primitive Christianity: Friedrich Engels’ “On the History of Early Christianity,” Karl Kautsky’s Foundations of Christianity, Bouck White’s The Call of the Carpenter,1 Naozo Yonezawa’s Musansha Iesu (Jesus the Proletarian), F. Herbert Stead’s The Proletarian Gospel of Galilee, and David Smith’s The Days of His Flesh. By “global” here we respectively mean American, British, Japanese, German and Czech-Austrian in terms of the aforementioned writers’ nationalities. Equally under-explored are the ways these global sources have been creatively localized (bentu hua), or indigenized (bense hua), by Zhu through the lens of Sinicized Marxism. To capture the nature of this phenomenon, in this article I apply the discourse of globalization and its extended version, glocalization (Robertson 1995)—a discourse that has been adopted in analyzing the history of Christianity in China (Harrison 2013; Kilcourse 2016; Sachsenmaier 2018; Inouye 2019). The elucidation of the glocal entanglements in Jesus the Proletarian, the very first Life of Jesus (yesu zhuan) after the establishment by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of the People’s Republic of China, will shed new light upon not only the ways social Christianity and Marxism were interlocked with each other in quest of a historical Jesus by a progressive Christian intellectual, but also the ways Christian intellectuals like Zhu strove to remold themselves intellectually (sixiang gaizao) to the adaptation of the exclusively Marxist ideology under an avowedly atheist regime.

In what follows, I firstly offer a synopsis of Zhu Weizhi’s life and literary career up until the year 1950 when he published Jesus the Proletarian, before moving to discuss in detail Zhu’s borrowing from contemporary global sources for its composition. In this regard, Jesus the Proletarian, a Chinese historical novel falling under the genres of both Life of Jesus and leftist/proletarian literature (zuoyi wenxue or wuchan jieji wenxue), can be read as part of world literature. The last section examines the ways Zhu adopted Marxist viewpoints and the CCP’s political terms to re-imagine a Gospel according to Marxism for New China (xin zhongguo). A Christian socialist theology underpinned Zhu’s literary enterprise. Along with other Chinese intellectuals, the Christian intellectual Zhu Weizhi was grappling with the problem that modernity (in the forms of revolution, rationalism, secularization, and Marxism in this context) had posed for traditional (i.e., “feudalistic” and “capitalistic”) conceptions of Jesus. In an epoch when all religions including Christianity were plunged into a precarious situation, Zhu’s literary apologia might be doomed to fail, but what might be worth rethinking even until now is his very endeavor in quest of the relationship between Jesus and proletarity, religion and politics, literature and ideology, and spirituality and secularity.

2. Zhu Weizhi’s Life and Literary Career

Zhu Weizhi was an offspring both of the modern Protestant missionary movement and the secular New Culture/Literature Movement. Born on 26 May 1905 into a “middle-peasant family” (zhongnong jiating, a Marxist-laden term used by Zhu in his later years) in a southern village of Wenzhou, China, a city that would later be called “China’s Jerusalem” (Cao 2011), the boy Zhu enjoyed himself very much in Nature—“beautiful mountains and clear waters” and “the blue sky and white clouds” (Cui 1999, p. 46). There is little wonder that he would later identify affectively with a boy Jesus who “lies freely under a fig tree and watches clouds coming and going slowly” (Zhu 1941, p. 5).

There seems to be of no record as to when and why Zhu’s peasant parents converted to Christianity, but their acquired faith (Liang 2000, p. 490; Zhu 2009, p. A22; Qu 2011, p. 92) played a decisive role not only in Zhu’s primary and higher education, but also in his growing interest in the Bible—a religious and literary text Zhu would devote himself to studying for the rest of his life. For primary education, Zhu likely spent about four years in a China Inland Mission boarding school in Wenzhou city, where he started to learn English—a language to be essential in his later years for his academic pursuits, such as translating the works of John Milton. For higher education, after five years in a Wenzhou teachers’ training school (secondary level), Zhu chose Nanking (Nan**g) Theological Seminary, partly because of its complete tuition waiver (Qu 2011, pp. 92–93, 95).

As important for his future literary career as education was Zhu’s enduring interest in the Bible since his childhood in a Christian family. As he recalled, “At that time [when he was still a middle school student in the early 1920s], there was nowhere to make inquiries about Christian literature, and nobody studied the Bible from a literary point of view. In my childhood, however, I loved myths, legends, and folktales in [the Bible]; during my middle school, I loved poetry in it.” By “poetry” he meant at least Psalms and the Song of Songs in the Mandarin Union Version of the Bible (UVB, 1919), arguably the most influential Chinese Bible in the twentieth century. Two other beautiful books in the UVB singled out by Zhu were the Book of Job and the Gospel of Matthew (Liang 2000, p. 490). His then love for the Bible as a literary text was assured by a well-known and beloved lyrical prose writer of the May Fourth era, Zhu Ziqing (1898–1948), who happened to be Zhu Weizhi’s middle school teacher for only about one year (1923–1924) (Liang 2000, p. 490; Zhu 1992).

Even before Zhu Ziqing’s arrival in Wenzhou, the middle school student Zhu Weizhi had enthusiastically embraced the New Culture/Literature Movement, and his literary favorites included some renowned literati emerging from this movement: Guo Moruo (1892–1978) and the books and journals produced by the Creation Society (chuangzao she, one of whose founders was Guo), Bing **deng, 1 time); the people (renmin, 5 times) or the masses (dazhong, 24 times); socialism (shehui zhuyi, 2 times) or communism (gongchan zhuyi, 2 times); revolution (geming, 22 times); “overturning the body” (fanshen, 3 times), liberation (jiefang, 17 times), or liberation movement (jiefang yundong, 7 times); political program (gangling, 10 times); class interest (jieji liyi, 1 time), class consciousness (jieji de yishi, 1 time), class struggle (jieji de douzheng, 1 time), or class antagonism (jieji duili, 1 time); the privileged class (tequan zhe or tequan jieji, 20 times), the propertied class (youchan zhe or youchan jieji, 4 times), or the bourgeoisie (zhongchan jieji, 6 times); the proletariat (wuchan zhe, wuchan jieji, wuchan dazhong or puluo lieta liya, 55 times), the working class (laodong zhe, laodong jieji or laodong dazhong, 6 times), or the oppressed class (bei yapo zhe, bei yapo jieji, or the like, 13 times); proletarian solidarity (wuchan jieji tuanjie, 1 time) or unifying the masses (tuanjie qunzhong, 1 time); comrade (tongzhi, 12 times) and cadre (ganbu, 2 times); social sin (shehui de zui’e, 3 times); public servant (gongpu, 2 times); democracy (minzhu, 11 times); human right (renquan, 16 times); internationalism (guoji zhuyi, 1 time); social existence (shehui cunzai, 1 time); and dialectic (bianzheng, 5 times). Zhu’s Life of Jesus therefore arguably operated within a Marxism-oriented context. As far as I know, there is no single Chinese Life of Jesus—not even Jidu jiao yu zhongguo wenhua (Christianity and Chinese Culture) by Wu Leichuan (Wu 1936) or Geming de mujiang (The Revolutionary Carpenter) by Zhang Shizhang (Zhang 1939)—that has made such extensive use of Marxist terminologies as Zhu’s.

All these terminologies aside, we may also adopt a thematic approach to examine the extent to which Marxism was integrated into Zhu’s narrative. Jesus the Proletarian tells its story in 26 short chapters, drawing from all four Gospels as narrative materials in a typically harmonizing way. It opens its very first chapter with describing the contemporary Chinese dichotomy thinking of Christianity, seeing it either as downright superstition or as pure religion (“religion for religion’s sake”). In a polemical manner, in Jesus the Proletarian Zhu tried to transcend the conflict by arguing (against the Chinese young atheists) that the founder of Christianity was no less revolutionary and socialistic, while holding (against the pure religionists) in the meantime that the core of Jesus’ mission was not religious but socio-political (“religion for life/society’s sake”) (Zhu 1950b, pp. 1–3, 31–32). In the following, I would like to draw attention to six facets of the unfolding story of Zhu’s Jesus to illustrate the ways Zhu attempted to justify this two-fold argument by adopting Marxist viewpoints and CCP’s propaganda terms.

The class opponents of Jesus. From a literary perspective, not unlike Mark’s Gospel (Telford 2011, p. 21), one of the major strands of Zhu’s storyline or plotting is the conflict between Jesus and his opponents. Jesus had as his class opponents not only the Roman Empire who exploited Palestine and the aristocratic classes like the Sadducees as Rome’s local collaborators, but also the bourgeois Pharisees. As regards Pharisees, on the one hand they opposed the aristocrats’ loyalty to Caesar and committed themselves to “preserving the national essence” (baocun guocui), as Zhu puts it, while on the other hand, it is their class status as the bourgeois intelligentsia that brought “two-sidedness” (liangmian xing) and “wavering in determination” (youyi xing), thus “alienating themselves from the masses.” As Zhu remarks in the middle of the work, given their class nature, Pharisees “despise the proletarian masses and support the distinction between classes because they want to maintain their class privilege.” There is little wonder then that through a loose quotation from Matthew 23: 13–27, Zhu characterizes Pharisees as severely accursed by Jesus due to their collaboration in secret with the ruling class (Zhu 1950b, pp. 10–12, 46–48; cf. White 1911, pp. 96–99).

The dependence of social consciousness upon social existence. The class distinction between Jesus and his opponents further exemplifies Zhu’s understanding of this classical Marxist thesis. Two stories illustrate this point. One story concerns a narrative originally from John 3: 1–21—namely, the dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus, the latter being one of few (in Zhu’s terms) “progressive” and “open-minded” patricians. However progressive and open-minded, it is nonetheless because of “being blinded by class prejudice” that the patrician Nicodemus still could not grasp what Jesus meant by “regeneration” in the sense of remolding oneself. In a similar vein, Zhu tells another story about a well-known conversation between Jesus and the young rich man. This story ends with Jesus’ parabolic statement that “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God” (Matthew 19: 24). Zhu then makes a Marxist implication out of this narrative: “The living condition, social relations and social existence of an individual determine his consciousness, and class interest influences his standpoint. It is almost a mission impossible for a rich man to join a revolutionary community” (Zhu 1950b, pp. 38–39, 89–90).

Women as the liberator and the liberated. Much ink has been spilled by Zhu depicting the roles that women play in Jesus’ life and public ministry. Jesus’ mother Mary typifies one type of women as the liberator. The portrayal of Mary as a “revolutionary, laboring woman” makes up the whole fifth chapter of Jesus the Proletarian. In stark contrast to a Mary “born into a distinguished family” (xichu mingmen) in Zhu’s 1948 Life of Jesus (Zhu 1948, p. 17), two years later Mary in Jesus the Proletarian is reconstructed as someone “born into a humbly laboring family” (shengyu beiwei de laodong zhe zhi jia) (Zhu 1950b, p. 14) so that her proletarian-class background is well established. Along the same line with Luke’s Gospel (1: 46–55), Zhu refashions a progressive Mary partly through the message in her Magnificat—“an unparalleled, proletarian-revolting song” that “exudes class consciousness, revolutionary mood, and democratic thinking” (Zhu 1950b, p. 15). In this song, Mary is expecting that her future child would liberate the oppressed and the weak not from sin, but from their oppressor—the Roman Empire—even though the Magnificat itself does not mention the Romans by name. It is very likely that Zhu here borrows some critical insights from Bouck White, such as: “Heaven is not on the side of privilege and oppression, she [Mary] affirms, but is rather on the side of the trodden” (Zhu 1950b, p. 16; White 1911, p. 22). One more affirmation of Mary’s revolutionary character emerges when Zhu re-interprets what Jesus intends before his death in connecting his mother and the Apostle John (identified by Zhu as the disciple whom Jesus loved in John 19: 26–27). As opposed to what has been commonly assumed, in Zhu’s judgment, Jesus’ purpose is not that John should take care of the pitiful Mary, but that such a staunchly revolutionary woman as Mary would maintain the immature John’s faith (Zhu 1950b, p. 18; cf. White 1911, pp. 197–98). We may term Zhu’s characterization of Mary as a proletarian/revolutionary Mariology, which, not surprisingly, fits quite well into the CCP’s representation of “progressive women” that dedicate themselves to the revolutionary cause.

Another type of women concerns those seen as the liberated ones due to Jesus’ public ministry. One such woman, Mary Magdalene, is identified by Zhu as the woman in Luke who lived a sinful life (7: 36–38). According to Zhu’s account, whereas Simon the Pharisee, on account of his class prejudice, withheld from Jesus the customs for inviting distinguished guests, the “promiscuous” Mary Magdalene anoints Jesus’ feet with the ointment. Seeing through the hearts of fellow guest Pharisees who despise Mary Magdalene for her moral sins, Zhu’s Jesus absolves her from responsibility because he deems Mary Magdalene’s sinning out of not merely her own fault but also the society’s (Zhu 1950b, pp. 62–63; cf. White 1911, p. 124). This discursive strategy of defending the female sinner and blaming the society is adopted again in Zhu’s recasting of the narrative of a woman caught in adultery (John 8: 1–11). Zhu asserts that this woman works as a harlot simply because she “could not stand the economic oppression” and that Jesus sees these “social sins” as “far more severe and obstinate than the personal ones” (Zhu 1950b, pp. 97–98). Zhu thus constructs these biblical women as the liberated ones, for whose iniquities society at large is to blame. This theme of women’s liberation in Jesus’ time also resonates well with the CCP’s propaganda discourse of the time.

The class nature of Jesus. As has been stated previously, Zhu’s Jesus the Proletarian is a work revolving around the class nature of Jesus. To achieve his aim, Zhu primarily presents a fully human Jesus. It can be said without reservation that Zhu’s Jesus is positioned in exclusively human terms. Jesus’ birth from a virgin, divine nature, working of miracles, resurrection from the dead, and Parousia (second coming)—all these elements are missing from Jesus the Proletarian. In this non-miraculous framework, Zhu makes his attempt to justify a Jesus who belongs to the proletariat in at least three ways. First, in chapter 2 of Jesus the Proletarian Zhu contrasts ancient official history (zhengshi) in antiquity to the four Gospels. The near absence of Jesus in ancient official history, which tells of stories only concerning “princes and marquises” or “emperors and aristocrats,” is highlighted by Zhu to manifest Jesus’ proletarity. Only in the four Gospels, which Zhu attributes as “the people’s history recorded by the people,” can we find the trace of Jesus as a proletarian (Zhu 1950b, pp. 3–4).

Another way Zhu used to refashion a proletarian image of Jesus was to reconstruct the world into which Jesus was born. The Nativity narrative in Luke is appropriated by Zhu in chapter 6 to illustrate the contrast between a baby Jesus who “did not even own a cradle” on the one hand, and “the patricians and the propertied classes who lived a leisurely life” on the other. In contrast to imagining the Nativity story in Jesus Christ as “the most beautiful poem” (Zhu 1948, p. 18), two years later Zhu reconsiders the Nativity night, not as “a silent night,” but as “a miserable and depressing night.” This is the case because, according to Zhu, the poll tax that the Roman government collects from the proletariat such as Jesus’ parents is abusive and the homeless shepherds in the field of Bethlehem suffer even more from the exploitative tax collecting. In a word, Zhu’s Jesus was born “not so much on earth as on a living hell” (Zhu 1950b, pp. 18–19).

A third way of sha** the class nature of Jesus concerns an emphasis upon the labor work of Jesus as a carpenter. The labor work makes our young protagonist so conscious of the value of laboring (laodong) that he later would come to some truth claims such as “the laborer is worthy of his hire” (Luke 10: 7) or “my father [read here Joseph, Jesus’s earthly father, rather than God, Jesus’ heavenly father] worketh hitherto, and I work” (John 5: 17). Zhu then lauds Jesus for his thoroughgoing viewpoint about labor. “Labor creates the world and the universe,” as Zhu puts it, “and since the universe is still unfinished yet and in the creating process, we need to labor to create a just world without oppression” (Zhu 1950b, pp. 22–23). Zhu’s underlining of labor resonates again with both Marxism and the CCP’s political discourse, and all these serve to render Jesus more attractive to the Chinese proletariat. In terms of theology, we may title Zhu’s presentation of Jesus as a proletarian Christology.

The basileia (kingdom) mission of Jesus. In chapter 9 of Jesus the Proletarian, “The Program of the Liberation Movement,” the mission of Zhu’s Jesus is to advocate for “a movement of the kingdom of the heavens” (tianguo yundong)—that is, “a movement of new social construction” not only for liberating the slavery class but also for fundamentally remolding the lives of human beings. This movement of the basileia of the heavens, then, has little remaining religious connotation. In truth, the “maximum program” (zuigao gangling)—a conspicuously communist-style terminology—of Zhu’s Jesus corresponds to that of communism and the CCP: “a new society where all human beings live, without class distinction and exploitation.” In a nutshell, the basileia of the heavens equals a communist society.

Yet Jesus’ maximum program cannot be achieved hastily. It needs to be accomplished step by step, and the very first step to take shall be the act of inculcating the masses with the “awareness of human rights”: the proletarian class should have been equal to the propertied class because the former are as much the children of God as the latter. Rather than a revolutionary proper (as Bouck White has depicted) given the means he employs, Zhu’s Jesus is more like a teacher or a prophet. The motif of awakening the masses on the part of this teacher-prophet figure, in line with White’s narrative (see, for example, White 1911, p. 93), runs through Jesus the Proletarian. For example, although used to be despised abusively as “Galilean pigs” by Jerusalem’s patricians, Zhu claims, the proletariat from Galilee where Jesus grows up are told by Jesus that “God is on our side” and that “God’s wisdom is hidden from the wise and prudent and is revealed unto the lowly brothers” (adapted respectively from Matthew 1: 23 and 11: 25). The use of the term “Immanuel,” meaning either “God with us” or “God on the side of us,” “becomes a voice of liberation that makes a great impact on the lowest class” (Zhu 1950b, pp. 31–33). Theologically, the basileia mission of Jesus can be understood as an awakenment soteriology.

The passion of Jesus as the working out of dialectics. Finally, every Life of Jesus in history must find a way to come to terms with Jesus’ death. Against basing the passion narrative upon the religious atonement theory, Zhu refashioned his Jesus as a firm adherent of Marxist dialectics. When his second year’s public ministry begins, and another Passover approaches, Zhu’s Jesus recalls the meaning of the festival and the agency of salvation: when Moses led Israel out of the hands of the cruel Egyptian despot (cf. White 1911, pp. 153–54), the Passover lambs as sacrifices were vital to the Israelite nation’s very survival. Zhu’s Jesus derives from this national story the dialectics of death and life and the significance of martyrdom (xisheng). It then makes sense for Zhu’s Jesus in this context to state the following claim: “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12: 24). Jesus’ resolution to become such a grain of wheat reflects, Zhu avers, his “dialectical views of the world, life, and society.” Later on, in the district of Caesarea Philippi, Zhu’s Jesus announces to his disciples “the most important manifesto”: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?” (Matthew 16: 24–26) This manifesto indicates, again, Jesus’ “dialectical view of revolution” (Zhu 1950b, pp. 70–71, 76). The high praise of martyrdom, of course, was not alien to those Chinese who had just gone through the Anti-Japanese War and the civil war. Through Zhu’s re-imagination, the Chinese readers, just as Wainwright claims for today’s readers, “can read the passion narrative as providing a model for a life lived for the sake of justice and in fidelity to God, lived in a way that could lead to a martyr’s death, especially in unjust imperial situations like that of first-century Palestine” (Wainwright 2011, p. 41).

5. Conclusions

To conclude, Zhu Weizhi’s aim in composing Jesus the Proletarian is to provide a Marxist Jesus as equaling the historical Jesus, without the garbs of feudal and capitalist appropriations. Nonetheless, it is because of his Marxist framework that Zhu’s Jesus—just as the Jesus in Mark’s Gospel or any other Gospels—becomes another “Jesus of culture,” “constructed by the literary or religious imagination and propagated in the interests of the believing community or society” (Telford 2011, p. 17). In kee** with Albert Schweitzer (Schweitzer 2001), New Testament professor Delbert Burkett remarks that “Ultimately humans have created Jesus in their images ... These images may not tell us a great deal about Jesus of Nazareth, but they do tell us about the people who conceived or imagined them” (Burkett 2011, p. 9). In a similar vein, the quest of the historical Jesus in Communist China may tell us more about Zhu the progressive biographer than Jesus the protagonist.

Moreover, our understanding of the Sinicization of theology should not be limited only to its “cultural” aspect, that is, something like the use of “the Chinese concept of yin and yang to understand the divine and human in Jesus” (Burkett 2011, pp. 6–7). Traditional scholarship in theological studies has attributed the development of what we now call “liberation Christology” overwhelmingly to the Latin American theological works under the influence of Marxism, without giving due attention to their Chinese counterparts such as Jesus the Proletarian, a work published more than two decades earlier than Leonardo Boff’s Jesus Christ Liberator (1972) and Jon Sobrino’s Christology at the Crossroads (1976) (La Due 2001, pp. 160–80). Globally speaking, Zhu Weizhi’s Jesus stands as a precursor to his later Latin American counterpart. Jesus the Proletarian deserves to be appreciated as the Gospel according to Marxism in China that has long been forgotten and to which it is now time to pay heed.