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part in shaping the openness Ch'ea expressed once he had heard about the Christian message from these two Chinese colporteurs. Would he have rejected it if the speakers were Scottish missionaries? It is highly probable that he would have resisted such an obvious foreign intrusion. But as he began to read the Delegates' Version of the New Testament presented to him by A-Wye, Ch'ea read a Sacred Sutra (Shèngjīng23) very different from the texts read by Hóng Xiùquán (1814-1864) twenty years earlier. Previous translations had been prepared primarily by foreign missionaries, always in consultation with some "native informants," but hardly proper persons qualified to act as "expert consultants" on translation problems. The Delegates' Version, on the contrary, was the result of a rigorous process of interaction between foreign missionaries and traditionally trained Chinese informants, among them the young scholar, Wáng Tāo.24 Among their translation goals was the concern to create a translation attractive in style to a relatively educated Chinese person, in essence, a Bible with a Ruist flavour. When Ch'ea read the Delegates' Version of the New Testament, he felt the influences of a Ruist mind shaping the ideas of the text in numerous obvious and more subtle ways. In addition, and this very much due to Legge's personal commitments regarding the so-called "term question" debates, Ch'ea read a Shèngjīng which referred to "God" as shàngdì, the classical term in the Ruist canonical texts of the Book of Historical Documents (Shūjīng or Shàngshū) and Book of Poetry (Shījīng) for the supreme "Lord on High."26
25
No precise record of the dialogue between A-Wye, the colporteur, and Ch'ea, the keeper of the Poklo temple to Master Kong, was ever made. What is relayed through a letter conjointly written by Legge and Chalmers in 1856 is the following. Since A-Wye and his colleague intended to leave Poklo very soon for other areas in eastern Guangdong, they presented Ch'ea with a copy of the Delegates' Version of the New Testament and then proceeded eastward, promising to return sometime later. Their discussion had apparently focused in part on passages describing Jesus' dialogue with the Jewish literatus, Nicodemus (John 3: 1ff) and the Samaritan woman (John 4), dealing with the question of