Beijing, China - A latest research on a tombstone dating back to ninth century has shed light on the probability of Christianity having been popular among the Chinese during the Tang Dynasty.
The incomplete damaged eight-surface tombstone with scriptures of the Jingjiao or Nestorian Church and pictures of crosses were unearthed in Luoyang City in central Henan province in 2006, Luo Zhao, a religious teacher from Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said.
"To be exact, the Christian text was a China-proper ontological thesis about the Christian theology written by a prelate who had been long living in China in the late eighth century," said Luo.
Tombstones with Buddhist texts were common in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) but it was for the first time that tombstones with Jingjiao scriptures were discovered, he said. Chinese archaeologists had unearthed the Jingjiao stone tablet in 1623 in the Tang capital Xian, which threw light for the first time on the spreading of the religion in half a century after it entered China.