 The Bible did not play a primary role in Church preaching in sixteenth-century Europe or in the first Jesuit China missions; translation of the Bible was not a major concern.The Jesuit missionaries in Beijing were granted permission in 1615 to conduct mass in the vernacular and to translate sacred texts, though not into the vernacular but into “erudite language proper to the "literati".” Jesuit superiors in Beijing, however, determined that it would be more useful to translate other works than the Bible, though they made translations of the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, a catechism based on the Bible, and a life of Christ.Chinese could therefore have a reasonable knowledge of Biblical matters even though there was no published translation of the book itself.