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Reminds me of the message the pope of Rome sent to the Mongol khan. It did a bad job of explaining Christianity even in it's original Latin, but since there wer
by xdennis 5y ago
Reminds me of the message the pope of Rome sent to the Mongol khan. It did a bad job of explaining Christianity even in it's original Latin, but since there were no Latin to Mongol speakers it had to be translated through numerous other interpreters. Unsuprisingly the khan didn't understand anything.
Here's the begining translated to English:
> The immense benevolence of God the father, considering with ineffable piety the fall of mankind, which came to ruin by the sin of the first man, and wishing with great love to mercifully revive him whom diabolic envy has made prostrate by deceitful suggestion, has sent his only-begotten son, sharing the same nature with him, from the highest throne of heaven to the lowest dirt of the world, he who, conceived in the womb of the pre-elected virgin by the grace of the Holy Spirit and endowed there with the clothing of human flesh, thenceforth appeared to all, having exited from the enclosed gate of his mother's virginity.
The rest: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Dei_Patris_Immensa https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:Dei_Patris_Immens...
And here it is passed through this 10 times translator, perhaps approximating what the khan heard:
> Their women's father believes that the kidney is the most quantity of waste in the sky. He came into the world in rape of rape and done with the human body. The sword appears to my mom.
- wahern 5y agoRelatedly, Khan Güyük likely already understood the basic tenets of Christianity as Christianity had existed among the Mongols as a substantial minority religion for at least one or two centuries at that point. I think Khan Güyük actually had Christian relatives, though he himself was shamanist. It was even the Mongols who reintroduced Christianity to China, after it had been earlier wiped out. Europeans were completely oblivious to all of this, however.