The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom

Movement·Founded 1843 CE·Suppressed

Judaism → Christianity → The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom

Branch
Scripture of The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom

A Bible printed by a state, and a land law written like scripture.

The Taiping printed their own edition of the Old and New Testaments with Hong's annotations, and set the Book of Heavenly Commandments and the Land System alongside them. Candidates for office were examined on these texts instead of the Confucian classics — the most complete replacement of a canon attempted in Chinese history.

LanguageLiterary Chinese, printed at Nanjing
Composed1852 to 1864
What it holdsThe Old and New Testaments as the Taiping edited them, the Book of Heavenly Commandments, and the Land System of the Heavenly Kingdom
How it is usedDistributed as state texts, examined on in the Taiping civil service examinations, which replaced the Confucian classics with scripture
Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

The Taiping printed a Bible and then edited it, which tells you what kind of movement it was. Passages that embarrassed the theology — Noah drunk, Lot and his daughters — were removed or rewritten, and Hong added his own annotations as authoritative. The Book of Heavenly Commandments and the Land System of the Heavenly Kingdom were set alongside scripture as canonical. Most consequentially, the civil service examinations, the mechanism by which Chinese elites were made for a thousand years, were rewritten to examine on these texts instead of the Confucian classics. That is the most complete attempt at replacing a canon in Chinese history, and it is a large part of why the Qing gentry fought the Taiping so implacably.

The same ground, other faiths

claims that share this one's ideas
M Maimonides — the Rambam. Judaism · figure Meet them →
Nahj al-Balagha. Islam Open the book →
The Torah is binding as given. Orthodox Judaism · core tenet Go deeper →
Command, example, necessary inference. The Restoration Movement (Churches of Christ) Open the book →
The instrument is a matter of expedience; the pattern is not. The Christian Churches and Churches of Christ · core tenet Go deeper →
The Sabbath, from Friday sunset. The Branch Davidians · rite Go deeper →

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