As China’s human rights abuses have gained attention in recent years, so too has the Chinese Communist Party’s apparent agenda to revive the Cultural Revolution for the modern age.
From Uighur concentration camps to a high-tech social credit system to crackdowns on civil liberties in Hong Kong to saber-rattling over Taiwan, the CCP is undoubtedly the world’s most prominent authoritarian state, and they have most certainly not neglected to flex their influence over how the people of China worship.
In a country like China, where the state is regarded as supreme, few things threaten this authority more than the inerrant words of the Christian Scripture, so the CCP is now reportedly working to change these immortal words to make the Bible more palatable to their ideological aims.
Voice of the Martyrs spokesman Todd Nettleton recently told Faithwire that the Chinese regime has embarked on a 10-year plan to reshape the Bible.
“This is a project that the Chinese Communist Party announced in 2019. At the time, they said it would be about a 10-year process … to release a new translation of the Bible,” he explained, noting that this would in part infuse Confucian and Buddhist principles into the Scriptures.
The Chinese Party is able to give the impression to the world, as have many other communist countries, that full religious freedom exists in the country through massive oversight of religious institutions including its own state-sponsored church, the Three Self Church, which routinely teaches CCP ideology, including speeches from President Xi Jinping, under the auspices of sermons and Bible studies.
“This new translation … would really support the Communist Party,” he explained.
“The issue for the Chinese Communist Party is control. It is always about control,” he said. “And they see the … Christian message as something that would take control away from the communist party.”
The changes reportedly made to the text as part of this project is jarring — the new version features Christ stoning the woman caught in adultery Himself before declaring that He too is a sinner.
“The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) announced plans to update the Bible to ‘keep pace with the times.’ The revisions will include adding ‘core socialist values’ and removing passages that do not reflect communist beliefs,” a social media post from VOM explains. “In a textbook for high school students released in September 2020, the authors included a passage from John 8, as revised in their new version.”
Rather than telling the woman who he saves from public stoning by urging those among the crowd who have not themselves sinned to cast the first stone, the re-written version, purportedly included in a textbook, reads “When everyone went out, Jesus stoned the woman himself, and said, ‘I am also a sinner.’”
Nettleton explained that this change takes aim at the core of Christian theology — the very divinity of Christ and His ability to atone for the sins of mankind.
“In one sense, it’s just like so arrogant to think, ‘I’m going to rewrite the story of Jesus’… but then you think about denying the deity of Christ,” he said. “If Jesus is a sinner, then he’s not God.”
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