By Ron Grossman

As a pair of conservators at the Field Museum slowly unrolled an ancient Chinese scroll, on January 2, 2008, it dramatically revealed how far the Christian faith has traveled since that first Christmas in Bethlehem.

The delicate watercolor of a Madonna and Child is among oldest visual evidences of Christianity in the Far East. The figure is of a European-looking Mary holding an infant Jesus with a forelock knotted in the Chinese style. That multicultural iconography witnesses Christianity's ability to cross cultural borders.

The participants in the first Nativity scene presumably looked like the contemporary Semitic peoples of the Middle East. Shortly afterward, Christianity moved into the wider world of Greece and Rome -- as is reflected by the Madonna of the Field Museum's scroll, who looks like she stepped out of a Byzantine portrait. During the Middle Ages, missionaries carried the faith across mountains and deserts to China, where the scroll's artist gave Jesus the look of the child next door. The artist wanted to make it clear that Christianity was a universal religion.

In the scroll's lower left corner are two Chinese characters representing the name of a famed artist, Tang Yin, who lived from about 1470 to 1523, before the Jesuit arrived in China.

There is a striking similarity between the scroll and a famous painting, “Salus Populi Romani” which translates: “Our Lady, help of the Roman People”. It seemed likely that missionaries had carried a copy of the earlier work to China, where it, in turn, was copied by the scroll's artist.

The Jesuits weren't the first to missionize the East. Nestorian Christians were there perhaps as early as the 5th Century; Franciscans arrived during the time of the famed Mongol emperor Kublai Khan. Then the history of Christianity in China gets obscure, until the Jesuit missions, hundreds of years later.

The Chinese tradition long revered a Madonna-like figure, Guanyin, a goddess of mercy. However, before missionaries arrived, she was depicted as a solitary figure.