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The Nôm Works of Geronimo Maiorica, S.J. (1589–1656) and Their Christology

Author:
Format:
Dissertation
Year:
2006
University:
Cornell University
Thesis type:
Doctoral Dissertation
Place published:
Ithaca, N.Y.
Language:
Abstract:

Scholarship to date on early Vietnamese Christianity has chiefly treated the comings and goings of missionaries, the numeric growth of the Christian population over time, and church-state relations. By contrast, the theology of early Vietnamese Christianity has received little attention. The question of theological content is important since understanding it is critical to forming a view of what, exactly, early Vietnamese Christians believed and how those beliefs relate both to pre-Christian belief systems in Vietnam as well as Roman Catholic orthodoxy as it was construed at the time of Christianity's implantation in seventeenth-century Vietnam. This dissertation examines twelve of the earliest Vietnamese Christian liturgical and doctrinal texts in order to reconstruct the early Vietnamese Church's understanding of Christianity's central figure. Jesus of Nazareth. These texts, written in the classical Vietnamese Nôm script, are predominantly attributed to the Jesuit missionary Geronimo Maiorica (1589–1656). The discussion of the Maiorica texts' Christology in Chapter Four is preceded by treatment of three topics which serve to contextualize the subject. First, a brief biography of Geronimo Maiorica is offered. Second, Maiorica's Nôm works are identified. The date and authorship of the texts used in this dissertation is substantiated through the analysis of missionary records, documented archival studies, obvious in-text attributions of authorship and date, theological lexicon, and time-specific peculiarities in methods of forming Nôm characters. Third, the methods by which the Maiorica texts were composed and subsequently transmitted to the present by a process of hand-copying is analyzed. This study shows that while the Christ of the Maiorica texts is recognizably similar to the Christ of contemporary Jesuit teachings in Europe, several notable modifications to seventeenth-century Jesuit Christology were made for the sake of the Vietnamese audience. First, the Jewish prophetic tradition was consistently undervalued, with the result that Jesus, though still a savior of mankind, is no longer depicted as the fulfillment of Old Testament prophesy. Second, the physical and social environment in which Jesus lived and worked takes on Vietnamese characteristics. Third, the texts embellish their account of Jesus with attributes of authority and power thought congenial to the Vietnamese audience.

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