明清之際耶穌會士傳教的媒介，一以文言為主，往中國士大夫階層傳；一以白話為主，往民間中下階層傳。在白話此一傳統上，耶穌會士譯、寫了許多中國古來少見以白話「議論」的文字，不過不論所為是敘事或議論文，最後都以乾嘉之際賀清泰譯的《古新聖經》為集大成者。本文重點除了賀清泰《古新聖經》的語言特色外，除了從一字一詞到整句的分析外，也辨明賀譯受到拉丁文牽制的程度。因為後者，《古新聖經》中出現了大量中國首見的歐化體白話文，而此種新式語言一路擴展，造成的結果有二，一為中國在語言上預樹現代性的宏基廣廈，二則介入現代白話文之中，變成二十世紀初中國歐化體白話文的先聲。本文最後故而挪轉方向，再探《古新聖經》與中國基督宗教《聖經》中譯的關係。

The linguistic tools that European Jesuits employed to proselytize in the transitional period between the Ming and the Qing can be divided into two kinds: the traditional wenyan (classical Chinese), and the vernacular, the form that has long been neglected in the history of the Jesuits in China. This paper argues that the vernacular line of the Jesuit writings was inaugurated even during Matteo Ricci’s lifetime and the movement continued to flourish thereafter, culminating in Louis de Poirot’s translation of the Vulgate Bible into the colloquial idiom mostly spoken by the lower-class people in Beijing. Before 1803, when the Vatican officially declined to have Poirot’s Vulgate or Guxin Shengjing published, he had already translated about fifty-seven of the seventy-three books of the Vulgate. Nevertheless, Poirot’s merit lies in his use of a Chinese style that was not only colloquial but also Latinate or Western. This new type of vernacular Chinese, “Europeanized” as it is called today, disappeared until the first decade of the twentieth century. It is because of this particular style that Poirot’s Chinese Vulgate, in addition to its influence upon syntax and terminology of later Bibles translated into Chinese, paved the way for the newly developed Mandarin Chinese, which prevails in China today.