Did the ancient Chinese know the Genesis stories?

Argue for and against Christianity

Moderator: Moderators

User avatar
Difflugia
Prodigy
Posts: 3017
Joined: Wed Jun 12, 2019 10:25 am
Location: Michigan
Has thanked: 3247 times
Been thanked: 1997 times

Did the ancient Chinese know the Genesis stories?

Post #1

Post by Difflugia »

In another thread, otseng mentioned an apologetic argument that I haven't heard often, but that I find novel. The idea is that certain Chinese characters contain meanings that refer to a knowledge of Genesis, but originating before any possible Chinese contact with Jewish or Christian people. It's apparently an old one, being attributed to seventeenth-century missionaries by Herbert Giles in 1902.

The book that otseng mentioned is The Discovery of Genesis by C. H. Kang and Ethel R. Nelson. It's not available as an ebook, though a bootleg scan isn't hard to find.

Another book cowritten by Ethel Nelson about the same topic is Genesis and the Mystery Confucius Couldn't Solve. It's also not available as an ebook, but archive.org has a scan that can be checked out and read.

There are also two articles from the old Answers in Genesis publication, Creation ex nihilo Technical Journal, placed online by Creation Ministries International, the "other half" of an acrimonious split between the US and Australian halves of Answers in Genesis. Each link is to the table of contents for the issue. Scroll down until you find the article and click on the PDF icon to the right: So, the question for debate:

Does the ancient Chinese language contain references to events portrayed in Genesis?

To be honest, I'm not sure how much discussion this will generate, but I thought others might at least find the argument fascinating.
My pronouns are he, him, and his.

User avatar
Difflugia
Prodigy
Posts: 3017
Joined: Wed Jun 12, 2019 10:25 am
Location: Michigan
Has thanked: 3247 times
Been thanked: 1997 times

Re: Did the ancient Chinese know the Genesis stories?

Post #2

Post by Difflugia »

The most common manifestation of this is the description of the Chinese character for "ship" refers to Noah's Ark. The reasoning is this:

船 (ship) = 舟 (boat) + 八 (eight) + 口 (mouth)

The problem for apologists is that there are other ways to arrive at this character. Briefly, here is a rundown of some linguistic features of written Chinese:
  • The simplest characters are stylized pictures:
    • Mountain: (a line drawing of a tall mountain)
    • Water: (a stylized stream with waves at the edges; older form: Image)
    • Fire: (a bonfire)
    • Wheeled vehicle: (a two-wheeled cart)
    • Small: (three dots; older form: Image)
    • Horse: (a horse with a flowing mane running toward the left)
    • Female/woman: (a person kneeling)
    • Person: (a person standing on two legs)
    • Fish: (a scaled fish with the head at the top and tail at the bottom)
    • Sheep: (the face of a ram with horns)
  • Words are often two or three characters that together describe the idea:
    • Landscape: 山水 (mountain-water)
    • Train: 火車 (fire-vehicle)
    • Pony: 小馬 (small-horse)
    • Woman: 女人 (female-person)
  • Complex characters can be created by combining simpler characters based on meaning ("radicals")
    • Fresh: 鮮 = 魚 + 羊 (fish + sheep, two foods traditionally eaten raw, so must be "fresh").
  • Complex characters sometimes include instead a phonetic clue to pronunciation.
    • "Mom": 媽 = 女 + 馬 (a word for a female that "sounds like" the word for horse, "ma;" 媽媽 = "Mama;" it doesn't mean "female-horse")
Two origins for "ship" that are considered more likely by scholars:
船 = 舟 + 㕣 (boat + phonetic based on an older pronunciation)
船 = 舟 + 沿 (boat + "travel along a river")
My pronouns are he, him, and his.

User avatar
1213
Savant
Posts: 11342
Joined: Thu Jul 14, 2011 11:06 am
Location: Finland
Has thanked: 312 times
Been thanked: 357 times

Re: Did the ancient Chinese know the Genesis stories?

Post #3

Post by 1213 »

Difflugia wrote: Wed Oct 13, 2021 3:02 pm The most common manifestation of this is the description of the Chinese character for "ship" refers to Noah's Ark. The reasoning is this:

船 (ship) = 舟 (boat) + 八 (eight) + 口 (mouth)

The problem for apologists is that there are other ways to arrive at this character. ...
Unfortunately I don't think this proves anything for atheist, but I think those characters are interesting and if it is a coincidence, it is about as amazing as if it would be intentionally done.

User avatar
Tcg
Savant
Posts: 8488
Joined: Tue Nov 21, 2017 5:01 am
Location: Third Stone
Has thanked: 2141 times
Been thanked: 2293 times

Re: Did the ancient Chinese know the Genesis stories?

Post #4

Post by Tcg »

1213 wrote: Wed Oct 13, 2021 3:39 pm
Unfortunately I don't think this proves anything for atheist,
Who claimed that this proves anything for atheists? The question is can apologist support their claims? Seems like a sretch to me. Maybe someone will step forward with evidence rather than just try to turn it into a theist versus atheist issue as is done so often even though it almost never is one and certainly isn't one in this case.


Tcg
To be clear: Atheism is not a disbelief in gods or a denial of gods; it is a lack of belief in gods.

- American Atheists


Not believing isn't the same as believing not.

- wiploc


I must assume that knowing is better than not knowing, venturing than not venturing; and that magic and illusion, however rich, however alluring, ultimately weaken the human spirit.

- Irvin D. Yalom

User avatar
Difflugia
Prodigy
Posts: 3017
Joined: Wed Jun 12, 2019 10:25 am
Location: Michigan
Has thanked: 3247 times
Been thanked: 1997 times

Re: Did the ancient Chinese know the Genesis stories?

Post #5

Post by Difflugia »

1213 wrote: Wed Oct 13, 2021 3:39 pmUnfortunately I don't think this proves anything for atheist, but I think those characters are interesting and if it is a coincidence, it is about as amazing as if it would be intentionally done.
It's not so much atheists in particular that would find it unconvincing, but anyone that understands the math of large numbers and large search spaces. It's the difference between "I won the lottery" in a search space of one, "one of my friends won the lottery" in a search space of maybe a hundred or so, and "somebody won the lottery" in a search space of a hundred million. Furthermore, unlike the lottery, we don't have a well-defined "hit" condition. The descriptions and interpretations are subjective, so it's more akin to the coincidence of "the numbers on my lottery ticket are interesting" or, perhaps more accurately, "my horoscope is very fitting today."
My pronouns are he, him, and his.

User avatar
brunumb
Savant
Posts: 5993
Joined: Thu Nov 02, 2017 4:20 am
Location: Melbourne
Has thanked: 6607 times
Been thanked: 3209 times

Re: Did the ancient Chinese know the Genesis stories?

Post #6

Post by brunumb »

Difflugia wrote: Wed Oct 13, 2021 3:02 pm The most common manifestation of this is the description of the Chinese character for "ship" refers to Noah's Ark. The reasoning is this:

船 (ship) = 舟 (boat) + 八 (eight) + 口 (mouth)
It could be just me, but I don't see the character for 'eight' in the one for 'ship'. The symbol above the one for 'mouth' does not look the same.
George Orwell:: “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.”
Voltaire: "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
Gender ideology is anti-science, anti truth.

User avatar
Diagoras
Guru
Posts: 1392
Joined: Fri Jun 21, 2019 12:47 am
Has thanked: 170 times
Been thanked: 579 times

Re: Did the ancient Chinese know the Genesis stories?

Post #7

Post by Diagoras »

[Replying to Difflugia in post #1]

Thanks very much for doing all that research - quite impressive to track all the sources down.

From the discussion in the 'Volume 19' article:
There are at least 24 characters associated with boat, flood and eight mouths (heads). We did not analyze phonetic characters, characters with unknown meaning or those not associated with the Deluge (figure 8). By analyzing 15 of the characters and interpreting them in the context of ancient Chinese legends and the Hebrew Scriptures, we have shown that we could recover the missing pieces in ancient Chinese history regarding the destruction of the world by the Deluge.
<bolding mine>

I didn't bother with a word count, but the high frequency of words like 'suggest' and 'likely' don't give me much confidence that the exercise was anything other than selectively sifting for desired patterns and coincidences - and discarding anything else that doesn't fit.

User avatar
Difflugia
Prodigy
Posts: 3017
Joined: Wed Jun 12, 2019 10:25 am
Location: Michigan
Has thanked: 3247 times
Been thanked: 1997 times

Re: Did the ancient Chinese know the Genesis stories?

Post #8

Post by Difflugia »

brunumb wrote: Wed Oct 13, 2021 8:50 pmIt could be just me, but I don't see the character for 'eight' in the one for 'ship'. The symbol above the one for 'mouth' does not look the same.
In this case, it's mostly a font issue. That component can be written either open or closed. Here's the same glyph from a calligraphy font:

Image

It's not entirely a font thing, though, because the underlying reason for the font difference is that even experts disagree about which original characters are represented by the components of the complex character. In this case, Chinese linguists are divided on whether that component represents the phonetic radical or is a meaning component derived from 沿 and it's written both ways. Note that in the book I linked earlier, Giles opines on yet a third reasonable possibility. That allows even more latitude in the ability to subjectively find biblical meanings in the Chinese characters that might not be obvious to one reading the apologetic argument.

There are thousands of Chinese characters that have existed for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years, with their origins sometimes lost to the mists of time. Though nominally the same, some of those characters are written slightly differently in different regions, somewhat analogously to variant spellings. The PRC has actually addressed this by standardizing the written language into "simplified Chinese" in an attempt to, among other things, make the language easier to learn and improve literacy. This has actually been effective, but there are now two competing forms of Chinese. Simplified Chinese is written in the PRC and Traditional Chinese is written in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japanese Kanji, and ethnic Chinese communities that predate the Communist revolution. An easy example is the character for "horse" that I used in my earlier examples:

Traditional:
Simplified:

Aside from simplifying individual characters, Simplified Chinese has cases of combining a number of more complex traditional characters into a single simplified character that now does double duty (or more).
My pronouns are he, him, and his.

User avatar
Difflugia
Prodigy
Posts: 3017
Joined: Wed Jun 12, 2019 10:25 am
Location: Michigan
Has thanked: 3247 times
Been thanked: 1997 times

Re: Did the ancient Chinese know the Genesis stories?

Post #9

Post by Difflugia »

Diagoras wrote: Wed Oct 13, 2021 11:37 pmThanks very much for doing all that research - quite impressive to track all the sources down.
Not to diminish the thanks, which I appreciate, but I used to collect apologetics books that were in any way novel and actually have a paper copy of the book otseng mentioned. I also used to subscribe to a few of the creationist "journals," including the Technical Journal. Finally, I spent a good chunk of 1998-1999 working in Beijing and learned enough Chinese to find that apologetic argument particularly fascinating.

Unfortunately, I haven't kept up with it and most of the things I remember are things like, "here is my business card," "a bottle of beer, please," and some of the more colorful insults that our driver hurled at fellow motorists.
Diagoras wrote: Wed Oct 13, 2021 11:37 pmI didn't bother with a word count, but the high frequency of words like 'suggest' and 'likely' don't give me much confidence that the exercise was anything other than selectively sifting for desired patterns and coincidences - and discarding anything else that doesn't fit.
Exactly. I didn't clutter the earlier part of the discussions with it, but my understanding of Chinese (shallow, though it is) is that referring to people as "mouths" isn't even a particularly Chinese metaphor. If that were the intention, I'd expect the character to have represented something like eight "heads" or eight "hands" rather than eight "mouths." Indeed, the Chinese word for "sailor" is 水手, "water-hand."
My pronouns are he, him, and his.

TRANSPONDER
Savant
Posts: 7960
Joined: Thu Apr 29, 2021 8:05 am
Has thanked: 932 times
Been thanked: 3487 times

Re: Did the ancient Chinese know the Genesis stories?

Post #10

Post by TRANSPONDER »

1213 wrote: Wed Oct 13, 2021 3:39 pm
Difflugia wrote: Wed Oct 13, 2021 3:02 pm The most common manifestation of this is the description of the Chinese character for "ship" refers to Noah's Ark. The reasoning is this:

船 (ship) = 舟 (boat) + 八 (eight) + 口 (mouth)

The problem for apologists is that there are other ways to arrive at this character. ...
Unfortunately I don't think this proves anything for atheist, but I think those characters are interesting and if it is a coincidence, it is about as amazing as if it would be intentionally done.
I'm afraid the apologetics wangle of equating 'coincidence' with 'deliberately done' by saying they are both 'amazing' won't work any more than picking Chinese character meanings that look (or can be claimed to look) like they equate to meanings in Genesis. The idea was of course to try to make old Chinese records validate Genesis -literalist belief. It was an old (Bible skeptic) argument that Chinese knew of no global flood. The believers tried to wangle a counter to that with a 'Flood' story which was about Chinese official controlling the flooding of a river. I can only assume ..in fact I can't get my head around How they thought that would work.

Post Reply