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it reminded its readers, in two delicately separated allusions, that the Christian general I-ssu had helped the emperor Su-tsung keep his throne in the traumatic An Lu-shan rebellion, but decently avoided an explicit statement to that effect. A well-educated Chinese reader would have gone away with the impression that there was probably something to the 'brilliant teaching', and that, in terms of social acceptability, it had solid credentials.
One very obvious feature of Adams' style in the Sian tablet inscription is the care which he took to express his meaning in straightforward Chinese wherever he could, and his distaste for transliteration from Syriac. His skill can be better appreciated now that other Nestorian works in Chinese have been found at Tunhuang. The Book of Jesus the Messiah, admittedly written very shortly after the Nestorians arrived in China, and apparently by a man with an imperfect command of Chinese, contains a large number of unattractive transliterations of proper names. Obviously names had to be found for Jesus, Mary, John, Pilate, and other major characters in the Christian story, but meaningless transliterations of obscure names such as Golgotha could easily have been avoided, and a Chinese name found to represent the name's meaning (the 'place of the skull'). Adam never fell into the trap of using a Syriac expression because he was too lazy to invent a better Chinese term. Indeed, he seems to have standardised, simplified, and improved the Chinese translations of uniquely Christian terms wherever he could. He discarded unsatisfactory seventh-century names for God in favour of A-lo-he. This term, to be sure, resembled the Syriac Eloi, but it was probably chosen by Adam because it had for many years been used by the Buddhists in China to translate their own term for God, Arbhar, and therefore had respectable associations for a Chinese reader. He used the expression 'pure wind' (ching feng) for the Holy Spirit, in preference to the not particularly apt 'cool wind' (liang feng), found in seventh-century Nestorian documents. Finally, he abandoned transliterations of the proper name 'Jesus', common in the seventh century, and used only the term Mi-shi-he, 'Messiah', which had by the 780s established itself as a convenient term for Christ.
We are now in a position to draw some conclusions about Adam and his personality. His collaboration in a translation of a Buddhist scripture into Chinese demonstrates that he was reasonably fluent in Chinese, but perhaps overconfident in his linguistic ability;