The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is in the middle of a ten-year project to re-write, re-interpret the holy book Bible in Chinese language and recreate a version that would be then forced onto the Chinese Christians. One of the remarkable, shocking changes that are expected to be the part of the “Chinese” Bible would be depicting Jesus as a murderer.
There are around 130 million people who reportedly practice Christianity in China. Though everyone around the world has the freedom to worship god of their choice, but in China it seems CCP is playing the God. CCP wants its people to put faith aside and serve the party rather than bowing down in front of a Godly figure.
During the 19th party congress in 2017, CCP chairman Xi Jinping declared his intent to pursue “the sinicization of Chinese religions and provide active guidance for religion and socialism to coexist.” He wished to control all religious doctrines and practices and promoted persecution of Buddhist and Muslim ethnic minorities and now the focus is on Christians in China. Later in 2018, the Vatican compromised with the CCP in order to appoint a Roman Catholic clergy in China. The West has a concept of religious freedom under the Church, but CCP was a dominant force here which believed nothing has to be above the state and might infringe with their way of working. Also, experts believed that because CCP is looking to select the next Dalai Lama, the supreme leader of Tibetan Buddhism, having a strong hold over other religious minorities would help their cause.
The former US Representative and Political Commentator Mike Gallagher has been keeping a close watch on CCP’s attempts to re-write the Bible and had cited two major changes in the holy book. The first from the account in the Gospel of John of Jesus telling the woman caught in adultery to “go, and from now on sin no more,” after telling the scribes and Pharisees, “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her (John 8:3-11).” But a textbook from a Chinese university appeared in 2020 angered the Chinese Catholics with the account from the Gospel of John rewritten to end with Jesus himself stoning the adulterous woman to death and saying I am too a sinner. But of the law could be executed by men without blemish, the law would also be dead.
The second is a report that CCP authorities in Henan province “forced Protestant churches to replace the Ten Commandments with Xi Jinping quotes,” changing the first commandment from, “Thou shalt have no other gods before Me,” (Exodus 20:3, KJV) to, “Resolutely guard against the infiltration of Western ideology.”
There are also many instances of Christian pastors testifying for persecution in China at the Congressional meeting. But they also showed a strong will to follow the teachings of Jesus and practice Christianity undeterred and this has resulted in spurt of even more Churches in China.
CCP has stand that whatever changes they are making in the Bible are an update with socialist values and removing passages that do not reflect communist beliefs. The Christians in China believe that CCP by re-writing their scriptures want to confuse people and prevent them from becoming Christians. Moreover, Bible for children is totally forbidden in China and all Bible related apps were forcefully removed from the e-commerce sites, and millions of Chinese Christian children were made to fill a form renouncing their faith in public.
As per an approximate there are over 60 million Protestant Christians in China today, more than Germany (43 million) and France (38 million). Also, there are two kinds of churches in China, the underground churches and public state-sanctioned churches. The Christians who visit the underground churches do it in complete secrecy and state-sanctioned churches are open to public as they follow China’s Christian council and the Three-self patriotic movement. The the catch is that China is okay with you being a Christian until you follow a state-sanctioned church and read bible re-written by the CCP. This way the CCP is not repressing a religion but making the Chinese Christians follow their own version of Christianity. CCP understands that the religious scriptures have a strong control over people and by by re-writing the Bible it can control the Church and therefore the Christians in China.