Heaven Names in the Translations of Zhi Qian

It has long been recognized that the ti ng n dìzh , or "heavenly stems" and "earthly branches," may provide a clue to the origins of the Chinese writing system. Indeed, it is probable that the ten stems and twelve branches are the most archaic remnant of a very early stage of written Chinese. 1 Even though some appear originally to have had concrete referents or to bear a resemblance to Shang graphs whose meaning is known, the one and only application of the binary g nzh combinations is as ordinals and, uniquely in the case of the ten stems, as cultic appellations for the royal ancestors. As Edwin G. Pulleyblank remarked:

The Philosophical Forum, 2022

The relation between heaven and humanity is a central topic in Chinese philosophy. It is often examined through tianren heyi, a term considered the most significant to Chinese culture. In this article, I argue that tianren heyi is inappropriate and even misleading in our discussion of the relation between heaven and humanity. I investigate

Religious Studies Review 39.2: 59-64., 2013

The American Historical Review, 1987

Theological Studies, 1995

οτι ήκουον εις έκαστος τη ίδία διαλέκτφ λαλούντων αυτών-Acts 2:6 C ONTEMPORARY TRANSLATION theory has seized upon the story of Ba bel as its touchstone. We live "after Babel," says one contempo rary theorist; 2 another believes that the story of Babel "can provide an epigraph for all discussions of translation." 3 But the Church under stands the legacy of Babel as having been profoundly altered by the event of Pentecost. No longer are languages confused and the people scattered; rather, each person hears the message of the gospel in his or her own native tongue. But this is not a reversion to the era before Babel, in which "the whole earth had one language and the same words" (Gen 11:1). The multiplicity of language remains, but the con fusion and failed communication, the legacy of Babel, has been deci sively overcome through the power of the Holy Spirit. Thus, in its very constituting event, the Church acknowledged that its message could be heard "in translation": that the differences be tween one's own native tongue and the t/r-text of revelation would not stand as a barrier to the proclamation of the gospel. In contradistinc tion to Islam (and to some versions of Judaism), the Holy Scriptures of the Christian faith are available not only in their original languages, but also in various vernaculars. However, the early emergence of Greek as the common tongue of Christian theology, and the maintenance of linguistic univocity in the West through its replacement by Latin, helped to mask the essential translatability of the Christian witness. A similar phenomenon has evolved in the Anglophone world, not only because of the pervasive influence (due to aesthetic, literary, and political factors) of the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible, but also because of the increasing hegemony of English as the new lingua franca in the inter-1 With much help and encouragement from Margaret Adam and Phil Kenneson. Thanks also to Α.