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The Chinese Community Party (CCP) plans to release a ‘Chinafied’ Bible with socialist values. An excerpt from John 8 makes its intentions crystal clear.

The CCP continues to ramp up its persecution of Christians. Crosses are burnt and removed from church buildings. Churches are heavily monitored; some are forcibly closed. Bibles for children are explicitly banned. Photos of Chinese President Xi Jinping and former Communist Party leader Mao Zedong are required to be hung in church buildings.

Now the Party is embarking on a new enterprise.

The Bible According to the Chinese Communist Party

Announced as a ten-year task, a project to produce an authorised ‘Chinese’ Bible began in 2019. Its aim is to remould the Bible in its own atheistic and communistic image.

As reported by The Guardian,

The plan calls for “retranslating and annotating” the Bible, to find commonalities with socialism and establish a “correct understanding” of the text.

A pre-released excerpt from John 8 makes for remarkable reading indeed.

Jesus Stoning the Sinner: John 8

The account of an adulteress brought before Jesus by the scribes and Pharisees is a favourite of many. Jesus is deliberately set up, evidenced by the fact the Jewish leaders have no similar concern for justice against the male adulterer, who is conspicuously absent.

Here, Jesus shows incredible authority and compassion, dismissing the setup and forgiving the woman, while also telling her to “Go and sin no more” (John 8:11).

The Communist Party version of John 8 tells a very different story.

As told in the new account, Jesus now gives the woman what she deserved:

Jesus once said to the angry crowd who was trying to stone a woman who had sinned, “He who is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone at her.” When his words came to their ears, they stopped moving forward. When everyone went out, Jesus stoned the woman himself, and said “I am also a sinner.”

The biblical Jesus is transformed from the sinless Saviour to a common sinner who carefully conforms to the law of the land. The socialist Jesus is a law-abiding role model for every good Chinese person who should ‘go and do likewise’. The law of the land is, of course, whatever the CCP says.

The Bible is currently available in China through the government-authorised Three-Self Patriotic Movement (TSPM) – a State-controlled Protestant denomination. But its availability is severely restricted.

If its Chinafied Bible is finished, it is likely the CCP version will become the only ‘Bible’ legally available in the country. All other Bibles would be banned.

If, like Jesus, you’re a good socialist citizen, you’ll gladly follow the impeccable CCP and its Bible wherever they go.

The Chinafication of Christianity

The ‘Chinafication’ of Christianity – the goal of bringing Christianity in conformity to the CCP – is now being applied to the Bible with particular precision.

The intent of the atheistic CCP has always been to control the Chinese Church and co-opt it to further its own purposes.

Sure, you can be a Christian in China, no problem. As long as your Christianity looks indistinguishable from the values and beliefs of the Party.

One such example from Yugan’s Huangjinbu township gives a perfect example. As reported in The South China Morning Post, in 2017, Christians were given poverty relief if they replaced their pictures of Jesus with portraits of President Xi Jinping in their own homes. Qi Yan, head of the poverty-relief effort, said:

“Many poor households have plunged into poverty because of illness in the family. Some resorted to believing in Jesus to cure their illnesses. But we tried to tell them that getting ill is a physical thing and that the people who can really help them are the Communist Party and General Secretary Xi.

“Many rural people are ignorant. They think God is their saviour… After our cadres’ work, they’ll realise their mistakes and think: we should no longer rely on Jesus, but on the party for help.”

A Resilient Response

Despite decades of religious discrimination, the Chinese Church continues its remarkable growth from very humble beginnings.

Chairman Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, once told foreign visitors, “Christianity in China has been confined to the history section of the museum. It is dead and buried.”

But since the 1970s, the remarkable growth of the church in China has seen its numbers explode from approximately one million believers in 1949 to around 100 million today.

China is on track to contain the largest number of Christians in the world, overtaking the USA in the not-too-distant future.

By all accounts, attempts to control the Chinese Church and restrict its growth have been abysmal failures.

For this reason, the Christian Church continues to cause consternation in the CCP.

Chinese Christians will increasingly be faced with the decision between loyalty to the State and loyalty to Jesus. For believers who choose the latter (and if the CCP Bible is released, choose the real Bible), the words of Jesus to the church in Philadelphia come into sharp relief: “You have but little power, yet you have kept my word and have not denied My name.” (Rev 3:8)

In the very same verse, Jesus says that because of the church’s faithfulness, “I have placed before you an open door that no one can close”. Applied to the modern-day Chinese Church, these words affirm that five decades of explosive church growth is something even the world’s second-largest superpower cannot stop.

And that is something the Church in the decaying West would do well to learn.

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Image via ChurchPop.