07-016 Swedenborg, and Chinese translations of his works

07-016
Swedenborg, and Chinese translations of his works

After Ellen White, Mary Baker Eddy, Joseph Smith, and Sun Myung Moon, I am going to talk about another person who has also claimed to have received direct revelations from God. His name? Emanuel Swedenborg.

Emanuel Swedenborg

The mysterious stories of Swedenborg are everywhere on the internet. There is a long article about him on Wikipedia. Many podcasts are also available on YouTube talking about Swedenborg, if you don’t want to read.

Like others, Swedenborg wrote down his revelations in many different works. People refer to those works as Swedenborg’s Theological Writings. According to this source, a total of 18 books on spirituality were published during his lifetime, together with many shorter articles. A further 25 titles were published posthumously after his death, and 15 miscellaneous works were discovered later on, mostly short or incomplete works.

Different from the other four ‘prophets’ I have mentioned in the earlier posts, Swedenborg did not start his own church. Only in 1787, 15 years after his death, his followers started the New Church movement in England. Compared to the Seventh-day Adventist or the Latter-day Saints, Swedenborgianism is not very large. There are only around 10,000 Swedenborgian followers nowadays, mainly in English-speaking countries.

Swedenborgian Christianity has never set foot in Asia. Swedenborg was almost unheard of in Chinese culture. But everything changed in 2010 when a mysterious book was published in Taiwan. The book has a Chinese title “通行靈界的科學家”. It is published by “史威登堡研究會” and claimed to be a translation of the book “Swedenborg’s Great Gift”.

Swedenborg’s Great Gift

However, no information about the publisher or the original title can be found on the internet. The name of the publisher can be roughly translated as “Swedenborg Research Center”. There are many Swedenborgian organizations bearing a similar name, which I could not identify which one is the publisher. And searching the book title “Swedenborg’s Great Gift” returns nothing. A Singaporean blogger said the original title is not written in English but in Korean. And the Unification Church of Taiwan shared an article on their official website, praising this book. Could the original title be a work of the Moonies?

The book is not a direct translation of Swedenborg’s works. It is more like a biography of Swedenborg and a rendition of his works. Nevertheless, the book became one of the top sellers in Taiwan for more than a year. Since then, the fandom of Swedenborg began to bloom. In the next year, Heaven and Hell / 天堂與地獄 was translated and published in Taiwan, being the first Swedenborg’s work to get an official Chinese translation.

Heaven and Hell

Now, Swedenborg has a big fan club in mainland China and Taiwan. Since Swedenborg’s works are not exactly the Bible and Swedenborgianism is not exactly a religion in Asia, the Chinese government allows the fandom to exist, treating it as something similar to Marvel, D&D, or Lovecraft. Different volunteers have been translating his works into Chinese over the years. Nowadays, all 18 titles published during Swedenborg’s lifetime are translated and available for download. Translation of the posthumous works is underway. At the time of writing, 6 of the 25 posthumous works were translated.

In the next post, I will move away from Christianity to other religions. Of course, extra-Biblical texts are not limited to these. For example, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and the Rastafarians include more books as canonical. But since those churches have no branches in China, I do not mention them specifically. As far as I know, none of their extra-Biblical texts have been translated into Chinese.

 

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