ABSTRACT
The figure of Jesus had been crucial for the sympathetic attitude of May Fourth writers towards Christianity. Apart from its influence on the shaping of a modern literary Chinese, this Bible translation into Mandarin also helped to introduce biblical motifs and figures to Chinese literature. The portrayal of Jesus as a fool is a common topos in European literature. Compared to Lu Yuan's usage of biblical figures as examples for ethical values, the young poet Hu Xudong in his poem “Teaching Adam Chinese,” composed in 1997, employs biblical names in quite a different vein. With reference to the identification poet-Jesus, Michelle Yeh notes that this phenomenon can also be observed in Taiwan avant-garde poetry of the 1950s and 1960s.
