When modern missionary activity developed among Roman Catholics in the sixteenth century, partly influenced by the founding of the Society of Jesus, and reached its heyday among Protestants in the nineteenth century, various questions about pre-Christian faith came to preoccupy Christian theologians. The Jesuit Matteo Ricci argued in the early seventeenth century that the original word for God among Chinese Confucians (Shangti) represented a form of monotheism consistent with Christianity, but that this had later degenerated into “atheistic neo-Confucianism” (Ahn 2011: 44–5). The London Missionary Society missionary and noted sinologist James Legge, working in China during the early to mid-nineteenth century, supported Ricci's interpretation of an original Confucian monotheism that had subsequently degenerated. Legge suggested further that humanity had diffused throughout the world from a single source according to the Genesis account of the Tower of Babel (ibid.: 76). Ricci and later Legge represented a missionary strategy that, although controversial and contentious among some of their church sponsors, anticipated later academic discussions of an original monotheism as the source of religion, which had deteriorated into polytheism, animism and lower forms of religion. As a missionary theology, this fitted nicely into the Christian doctrine of a fallen humanity, which could only be rescued by accepting Christ and by returning to the true, pure monotheism of biblical faith.