Timelines - Bible vs China

Question - Do you know whether the Jewish Exodus corresponds with the beginnings of the Chinese practice mentioned (in my post on Pastor Mark's sermon part 1)?

Okay this one tough leh ha ha ha... Got to do a lot of research. I is no scholar but here are some attempts at researching about what Pastor Mark shared. I will touch only on the stuff mentioned in Part 1 for now. (Grins - I keep getting distracted from putting up the rest of the sermon notes. So tempted to just wait for the actual sermon CD to come out and let you guys hear it for yourself... hehe)

I can't answer it exactly as there are very little records on when the chinese red paper stick on doors tradition started... but it has been around for eons.

What I can only do is to put up a comparison of timelines and any interesting facts I could find. Enjoy! =D

DOOR GUARDIANS

Ok about the door guardians... I found an interesting account about them

Long ago there was a magical peach tree that grew on on Mount Tu Shuo. It was so big that its branches spread for miles around. The branches that spread toward the north-east formed the Door of the Spirits through which millions of souls past after they died. Two guards, Shen Shu and Yu Lei were assigned to guard this entrance. Those who had been evil during their lives were instructed by the Jade Emperor to be caught, bound and thrown to the tigers.

(http://www.csupomona.edu/~plin/folkreligion/doorgod.html)

Hmmm could this Magical Peach Tree and Mount Tu Shuo be somehow a perversion of the Tree of Life (we know in Chinese mythology Peach represents LONG LIFE) & the Garden of Eden?? Interesting how the 2 door guardians were set to protect them just like the 2 cherubims were sent to protect the Garden of Eden and the Tree of Life.

Also note - the tigers who devoured the unrighteous, correspond with the revolving sword of fire that prevents access to the tree of Life (aka the heavenly peach tree).

RED PAPER STUCK ON SIDES OF DOORS

I also found on , this interesting account of Nian. I know we know the story like we know the back of our hands... but as I was reading the following, I felt it sounded a little like the account of the Angel of Death passing over the houses painted with the blood of the Lamb. Nian passed over the houses that had the red paper stuck on them? Any one catch the similarities??

• The origin of the Chinese New Year Festival can be traced back thousands of years through a continually evolving series of colorful legends and traditions. According to one of the most famous legends, in ancient China there lived a monster named Year who, with a horn on the head, was extremely ferocious. Year lived deep at the bottom of the sea all the year round and climbed up to the shore only on New Year's Eve to devour the cattle and kill people's lives.
  
  Thereupon on the day of every New Year's Eve people from all villages would flee, bringing along the old and the young, to the remote mountains so as to avoid the calamity caused by the monster of Year.
  
  On the day of that New Year's Eve the people of Peach Blossom village were bringing along the old and the young to take flight when there came from outside the village an old beggar. With a stick in his hand and a bag hanging upon his arm, he had eyes twinkling like stars and graceful beard as white as silver.
  
  Seized with panic, the villagers were in a great hurry to run away. Some were closing the windows and locking the doors, some were packing, and others were urging the cattle and driving the sheep. At a time when the people were shouting and the horses were neighing no one was in the mood to care for the beggar.
  
  Only a grandmother living in the east end of the village gave the old man some food and advised him to flee to the mountains to avoid the Year monster. But the old man stroked his beard and said with a smile, "If you allow me to stay at your home for the night, I'm sure to drive away the monster Year."
  
  The old woman was surprised to hear this. She looked at him unbelievingly only to find that, with white hair and ruddy complexion, the old man had a bearing out of the ordinary. She went on to persuade him to take flight. But he only smiled without reply. Thereupon the grandmother could not help but leave her home and flee to the mountains.
  
  Around midnight the monster Year rushed into the villages. He found the atmosphere was quite different from that of the previous year. The house of the grandmother in the east end of the village was brilliantly illuminated, with bright red paper stuck on the doors. Greatly shocked, the monster gave a strange loud cry.
  
  The monster Year stared angrily at the house for a moment. And then howling furiously, he made a pounce on it. As he approached the door, there came all of a sudden the exploding sounds of bang-bong. Trembling all over, the monster dared not make a step forward. It turned out that the red color; flame and exploding were what Year feared the most.
  
  (http://www.fmprc.gov.cn/ce/ceke/eng/zt/clny/t182905.htm)
  
  Again, it is a matter of perception... but I am keeping in mind how this is like a telephone game - you know the one we played in our childhood where one person starts off with a couple of sentences that he whispers into the next person's ear to repeat to another... and many people later, the sentences are totally distorted & altho' has a bit of the original content, sounds almost nothing like it. =)
  
  STUDY OF TIME LINE
  
  
  Just to give you a rough idea of the Biblical timeline =D
  
• Beginnings of the Human Race was around 4004-2090 BC.
• Tower of Babel incident was around 2700 BC
• Abraham was born in 2135BC
• The story of Joseph took place from 1897-1804 BC.
• Moses was born in 1525BC.
• Exodus occured during 1445-1405 BC.
• Period of Judges was around 1398BC - 1043BC
• Gideon beat the Midionites in 1191BC.
• Saul anointed King in 1043 BC
• David was around from 1041BC - 971 BC
• Ezra was about in 500 BC
• Christ came about around 4AD

Chinese Timeline - just to give you an idea of when some stuff appeared/occured. =D

• First appearance of Chinese Language was around 2700BC
• The first Chinese Dynasty was the Xia Dynasty 1994 - 1766 BC
• Somewhere during the 2nd Chinese dynasty of Shang or Yin that reigned from 1766 BC – 1027 BC, people paid respect to the door guardians (guardian angels) of their house, but there were no door guardians pasted on their doors then. The earliest evidence of the worship of Shang Di originates from this period (oracle bone inscriptions -i wonder if this is related to Urim and Thummim?)
• Zhou Dynasty 1122 BC -256 BC (Confucianism and Taoism were born)
  - In the Chinese historical tradition, the Zhou defeated the Shang and oriented the Shang system of ancestor worship toward a universalized worship away from the worship of Di and to that of Tian or "heaven". They legitimized their rule by invoking the Mandate of Heaven, the notion that the ruler (the "Son of Heaven" - note how this seems to be a perversion of Christ) governed by divine right but that his dethronement would prove that he had lost the mandate. Such things that proved the ruling family had lost the Mandate were natural disasters and rebellions.
• Confucious lived from 551 BC to 479 BC
• Qin Dynasty 221 BC - 206 BC
• Early Han Dynasty 206 BCE - 9 AD - During the Han Dynasty, the door guardians' images made their appearance.
• Xin Dynasty 9 AD - 24 AD
• Later Han Dynasty 25 AD - 220 AD
• Tang Dynasty 618 AD - 907 AD - During the Tang dynasty Daoism became fully integrated with the imperial court system, particularly under the reign of the Xuanzong Emperor (713–756AD)

Another interesting thing I dug out (from Wikipedia)

Shujing, or "Book of History", probably written around 700 BC or earlier, states in the opening chapters that Emperor Yao is facing the problem of flood waters that "reach to the Heavens". This is the backdrop for the intervention of the famous Da Yu, who succeeded in controlling the floods. He went on to found the first Chinese dynasty (Xia Dynasty). The translator of the 1904 edition dated the Chinese deluge to 2348 B.C., calculating that this was the same year as the Biblical Flood.

Da Yu was born the year 2059 BC.

Interesting also to note, amongst the descendants of Noah, Magog and his descendants were said to be the ones that went on to populate the Black Sea region + Central Asia as well. Could it be that Da Yu came from Magog's descendants? Just wondering lah... my own ponderings. Hehe.

And I know some of you already know this but I thought I'd talk about it anyway -

The modern Chinese word for boat or ship (船 chuan) is a curious one. It escaped the 1956 character simplification reform in China, but today it is found in two forms.

In both the forms, there is a sailing vessel ( 舟 zhou) as a radical, and also a character for "mouth" (口 kou) and finally, one with a component for "eight" (八 ba) .

The Japanese who are descended from the Chinese have a word for boat too. They call it "fune", and it looks identical to its Chinese counterpart.

The question is, why should there be eight mouths and not seven, or six or any other number. Obviously they refer to eight people, but which eight?

One possible explanation is that the word derives from an otherwise forgotten Chinese memory of a great worldwide flood in ancient times that is better known to the west as the Great Flood of Noah's day as recorded in the Jewish peoples' Hebrew Old Testament book of Genesis.

According to that account, there were exactly eight people saved from the Noahic flood ( seen in Gen 7:13): Noah & his wife, Shem & his wife, Ham & his wife, Japheth & his wife. The ark later landed on Mt. Ararat (not mt. Hermon) in Anatolia, Turkey (near Armenia that is near Georgia that is near Russia that is near China...)

All over the world, other ancient cultures - from southern Asia, the South Sea islands, and all parts of the continent of America, Africa, Ancient Egypt and Europe - have a story of the Great Flood too.

The Greeks had several versions of a myth in which a king Deucalion and his wife Prrrha escaped from a great flood by floating in a chest that finally landed on a mountain. They took refuge on Mt Parnassus (in central Greece not far from Delphi) and, at Zeus' command, cast stones which became a new race of human beings.

An Indian myth from the 6th century BC tells how the hero Manu was advised by a fish to build a ship as a means of escape from the coming flood. When it came, the fish towed the ship to a mountain top.

Excations at Ur in Iraq by Sir Leonard Wooley in 1929 may have confirmed the ancient belief of many nations when he discovered a layer of clay 3m deep which was apparently deposited by a great ancient flood.

A great worldwide flood was recorded in a Babylonian clay tablet, the Epic of Gilgamesh, written over 2,500 years ago. According to that epic the hero and sole survivor Utnapishtim landed on Mount Nisir (in Kurdistan, upper Iraq).

Today a surviving Chinese legend of an extensive ancient flood vaguely revolves around Nu Wa (see my post on her) who supposedly ended the flood by patching up the blue sky with five-coloured stones; the details are very different from the Hebrew version.

Only the character "boat" and its eight passengers seems to retain the truth of the Noahic flood.