Featured Translators Down Through the Ages

Continued:


III. Observations on the Conundrum

A. “There was a sharp rivalry (though never expressed to each other personally), including an unfair accusation of plagiarism against Marshman by some of Morrison’s colleagues.”[10] However, both versions provided a way for Christians of the time to study God’s word, and a foundation for future, better translations.

B. In later years the controversy arose about the best word in Chinese for God. Some translations use Shang Ti (上帝, Wade-Giles Romanization; Shang Di in Pinyan Romanization), which is the name of the original monotheistic God of Chinese religion, rather than Shen (神), used by Morrison and Marshman.[11] In fact, in China today one may buy the Chinese Union Version in either format.

C. If one advocates only versions translated from the KJV, one would choose the version done by the Presbyterian missionary. On the other hand, if one wants the correct word for baptism, one would use the Marshman version!

D. Both versions were criticized. Rather than disappointment, this brings up the thought that neither team was able to effectively use Chinese translation partners because of the Chinese legal restrictions of the day.

E. Translating “baptism” with a word meaning immersion as was the policy of the Serampore missionaries is more accurate and faithful to the original. However, it limits the circulation of the finished translation, since those who believe in sprinkling as the proper form of baptism will not use it. The opposite is also true. Therefore, the translator must carefully decide ahead of time how widely he foresees the translation being used.

F. If a Bible translator is worried about the opinions and criticisms of those around him or her, the translation will not be finished. The translator must know the call of God and the power and leading of the Holy Spirit.

CONCLUSION: This rivalry between two good men to produce a Chinese Bible translation is very instructive for the modern Bible translator. It highlights issues of working with the nationals, what word to use for God in the target language, what word to use for baptism, what the goals of the translator should be, etc. While respecting the work of these translators, we should learn from their mistakes and do our best for the Lord if we are called to be Bible translators.



[1] Moyer, 294.
[2] Tucker, 181.
[3] Toshikazu Foley, Biblical Translation in Chinese and Greek (Boston: Brill, 2009), 21.
[4] “Morrison Chinese Bible,” accessed on 4/28/15 at: http://www.streetpreaching.com/morrison/morrison _chinese_bible_1823.htm.
[5] “The Chinese Bible: How We Got It and How We Need It,” by Mans Ramstad, www.globalmissiology.org, p. 2.
[6] G. Winfred Hervey, The Story of Baptist Missions (Chancy R. Barns, 1885), 500.
[7] See seramporecollege.org.
[8] Foley, 25.
[9] Tucker, 181.
[10] Tucker, 180-181.
[11] For a full account of this, see Finding God in Ancient China, by Chan Kei Thong, 77-87.

 

For those interested in the history of Bible translation, and thus Bible translators, here are some suggestions.

Bruce Metzger has done an awesome job with two books:
The Bible in Translation
The Early Versions of the New Testament

One of the early books of Eugene Nida has some fascinating stories of missionary translators:
God's Word in Man's Language (1952).

A missionary friend wrote a book on the history of a famous Spanish translation:
The History of the Reina-Valera 1960 Spanish Bible, by Calvin George.

Histories of the English Bible:
A Pictorial History of Our English Bible, by David Beale (1982)
God's Word Into English, by Dewey Beegle (1960)
History of the Bible in English, by F. F. Bruce (1978)
The Ancestry of Our English Bible, by Ira Price (1906)

I know, these are mostly old school, but history doesn't change that much after it happens, so they're still good.

 

Bruce Metzger's book, The Bible in Translation, is very good and pretty recent.

 

This one is short, but it's about an awesome missionary translator, and I plan to add to it eventually. I might make all of these into a book.

Pioneer Translator to the Iroquois Nation
John Eliot
1604-1690


John Eliot moved to Boston from England in 1631, where he pastored the Roxbury Church. Through his work in translating the Bible and evangelizing the Iroquois, he became known as “The Apostle to the American Indians.”

An excellent linguist, he began studying Algonquin (the language of the Pequot tribe of the Iroquois) at age 40, preaching his first message in the language in 1646. He organized the first Algonquin church in 1660. By 1674 there were 3,500 “praying Indians” from his evangelism, organized into villages separate from the unsaved Indians to preserve their purity.

Before translating the Bible, he wrote a catechism in the Indian language and a grammar of their language. “At the end of his Indian grammar, Eliot appended the motto which sums up his life, and that of many other missionaries: ‘Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus will do anything.”[1]

Eliot had translated the New Testament by 1661, and finished the Old Testament two years later. His work is sometimes called the “Mohican Bible.”

Known to the Indians as a true friend, he left behind a vibrant church. Unfortunately, King Philip’s War in 1674 decimated the tribe (as depicted in the novel by James Fenimore Cooper, Last of the Mohicans), and there is no one left able to read Eliot’s Bible translation.

[1] Stephen Neill, A History of Christian Missions (London: Penguin, 1964), 192.

 

Awesome! I'll have to get that one.

 

Kind of you to say so. I love the subject.

 

U. S. Marines travel all over the world. Many of them have become missionaries to the countries to which they were sent as Marines. This is the story of the very first one of such missionaries.


The Original Marine Missionary
Jonathan Goble
1827-1896

It was 1853, and Commodore Perry’s famous black ships had sailed into Edo (now called Tokyo) bay, causing great consternation and even panic among the watching Japanese. Oh yes, the Japanese were even then as now a sea-faring nation. I don’t know how many times I’ve eaten some delicacy from the sea for the first time in that country. But the size of Perry’s ships and their technology had awed the Japanese into silence. Though they had learned how to make muskets, and called them Tanegashima after the island (now used by the Japanese Space Agency as their rocket pad) where the Portuguese first revealed their secrets, the cannons on the black ships were huge and powerful.

Thus it was that Perry cowed the Shogunate (the Japanese government of the day), which had outlawed any contact with the outside world, imprisoned and mistreated foreign sailors shipwrecked on Japanese shores, and generally refused to join the civilized world. The Shogun, Japan’s ruler, signed a treaty with America, and with that tremendous changes began to take place which would not end until well into the 20th century.

Meanwhile, among the Marine contingent aboard the flagship, the USS Susquehanna, was a young man named Jonathan Goble. Jonathan was a young Baptist believer, and had actually joined Perry’s expedition for the purpose of learning more about Japan in order to someday reach the Japanese for Christ.

On the trip over, Goble had befriended a young Japanese seaman named Sentaro, nicknamed Sam Patch by the crew, who had been shipwrecked overseas and was thus not allowed back into his own country. After arriving back in the home country after the expedition, Goble took Sentaro under his wing, and they went to college together, though college turned out to be somewhat beyond Sentaro’s ability. However, under the teaching of Goble, Sentaro trusted Christ as Savior and was baptized as the first ever Japanese Baptist believer.

Goble studied diligently, hoping to go to Japan someday as a missionary, but then was not allowed to continue in college after marrying a local girl. Goble would return with his wife to Japan to become the first Baptist missionary to the country on April 1, 1860.

The Gobles were under the auspices of the American Baptist Free Mission Society, and stayed for ten years on their first term. During that time they experienced incredible hardships, ministering as they did in a country that for most of that time still outlawed Christianity on pain of death. Among their other struggles, Mrs. Goble’s health went downhill.

Her loving husband thought of a wonderful idea. He took a picture of a British baby carriage from a magazine called “Godey's Lady's Book” to a Japanese carpenter in 1869 and told him what he had in mind. Thus it was that the first jinrikisha (“human-powered vehicle”), which we know as the rickshaw, was invented. Japanese history books say that a Japanese inventor in Tokyo designed the first one, but he evidently actually built his from a diagram given him by his Yokohama associate, Goble’s friend. Horses were rare and expensive in the Japan of that day, and people would hire a peasant to carry them piggy back over the river fords. Even the rich folk had to settle for a palanquin carried by four men. Therefore, the rickshaw in its day was a great leap in technology.

Goble’s other accomplishments as a missionary were much greater than the rickshaw, though. Goble probably translated the first hymn into Japanese, “There Is a Happy Land” (A History of Christianity in Japan, 1909, by Otis Cary, p. 87). Again, in 1871 he hired a Japanese printer to make wood blocks of his colloquial translation of the book of Matthew, which became the first Bible portion ever printed in Japan. (A German missionary to China named Karl Gutzlaff had previously printed his translation of John’s Gospel in Singapore.) He wrote, “I tried in Yokohama to get the blocks cut for printing, but all seemed afraid to undertake it, and I was only able to get it done in Tokyo by a man who, I think, did not know the nature of the book he was working on” (Cary, p. 86).

Goble kept very busy in the Lord’s work, with much foundational work to do before even attempting to start a church. Here is what he wrote about his work in the “Missionary Herald” of 1868: “I am as busy as I can be, teaching school, editing a native paper, and doing a little at translating. I am engaged by the Prince of Tosa to lay the foundation of an English college; and in prosecution of this plan we expect to go up into the country of Tosa to live. We are getting a font of Japanese type cast, and expect soon to be able to print Bibles, tracts, books, and papers, with press and moveable types. The English, Dutch, and Chinese versions of the Bible are already introduced as a reading-book in our school. Some of the pupils have of their own accord asked to be admitted to family worship, and others ask particular instruction in the Christian religion. One of the latter is a high officer of state to the Prince” (Cary, p. 65).

In spite of the fact that he was one of the very first Bible translators in Japan, He was not asked to participate in the translation of the first complete Bible in Japanese, the Motoyaku (“Original Translation”), translated primarily from the King James Version. However, he had no bitterness over that fact. In 1880, when the Motoyaku was published, “Rev. J. Goble, who was employed by the American Bible Society as a colporteur, had a small handcart made, which he stocked with books and so sold them through the streets of Tokyo and in different parts of the country. In the first month he sold about 5500 portions of the Bible. Not only did he himself effect these large sales, but he proved to the Japanese that the people were ready to buy if approached in the right way, and many of the colporteurs, who hitherto had been too dignified to push their business, learned from him how to do successful work” (Cary, p. 149).

After ten years on the field, Goble finally took a furlough. In the meantime, their mission board had ceased to exist, so for awhile they became the first independent Baptist missionaries! Eventually they came under the umbrella of the American Baptist Missionary Union. In 1873 they returned to the field with team mates, the amazing Nathan Brown and his wife. Brown had already worked many years with William Carey in India, where he had translated the New Testament into the Assam language, but after a time in the States arrived in Japan at the ripe age of 65! He later translated the first ever Japanese New Testament, and the only one in colloquial Japanese (instead of the difficult classical Japanese) for eighty more years!

The two families founded the first ever Baptist church in Japan in the city of Yokohama on March 2, 1873, beginning with just the two missionary families. However, in July the first Japanese convert was baptized, and the church grew from there. Yokohama Baptist Church is still in existence after these many years, and still remembers fondly the founders, as can be seen from their Internet website.

So what can we say about Jonathan Goble? It is said that he had a temper and was stubborn, and he sometimes mistreated those around him. He sometimes failed to concentrate on his main task of winning souls and was detoured into educational pursuits. But he loved Jesus Christ supremely, loved his wife dearly, and loved the Japanese with his whole heart and life. And that, readers, is what a missionary should be like!

Main sources: A History of Christianity in Japan, by Otis Cary, 1909; A History of Christianity in Japan, by Richard H. Drummond, 1971.

 

My son and I are team teaching "Pastoral Epistles"--awesome fun! He has taken the men downstairs to show them the resources in the library for this course, so I have a few minutes to add another story here. This is about another of my favorite Bible translators, Nathan Brown, who did the first complete NT into Japanese.

The Double Veteran Missionary
Nathan Brown
1807-1886

Imagine spending years of your life in India translating the Bible with pioneer William Carey, only to have to return to the homeland because of illness. Then imagine a fruitful ministry in the United States, including writing an effective book against slavery. Then imagine once again answering the call to the mission field of Japan at age 65, when you will translate the very first New Testament into the Japanese language. You have just imagined the amazing life of Nathan Brown!

Brown was a “haystack” missionary, one of the young Baptist men who dedicated himself to the Lord at Williams College as a result of the famous “haystack prayer meetings.” He seems to have become a member of the very first missionary society in America, the “Society of the Brethren,” which was started by the students in a dorm room.

After finishing his training at Williams College in 1827 (where the “Nathan Brown Prize in History” is dedicated to him), Brown first went to Burma, but shortly after that ended up in Assam, India. There he wrote the first grammar of the Assam language, and then finished his translation of the Assamese NT in 1850, whereupon he had to return to his homeland because of ill health. Back in the States, he joined the Abolitionist Movement, preaching sermons against slavery. He wrote an influential book opposing slavery, a satire entitled Magnus Maharba and the Dragon.

In 1868 Brown got to know some Japanese students at Bridgeport Academy and Princeton. He then wrote another satire criticizing the materialism of America as seen through the eyes of the Japanese students. In answering the call to go to Japan, Brown prayed for three things: to serve the Lord for at least ten years in Japan, to be able to translate the first Japanese NT and to plant one church. God answered all three prayers!

Brown joined Jonathan Goble in Japan in 1873. The two of them founded the first ever Baptist church in Japan on March 3, 1873, in the hilly port city of Yokohama, where Commodore Perry’s famous black ships had shocked the nation of Japan into modernity. Within four months the two men had baptized their first convert, and the church was completely Japanese within four years! This is an astonishing record for the time, since Christianity was still technically outlawed on pain of death.

What is so amazing about this second trip of Brown to the mission field is that Brown then not only learned Japanese from scratch at age 66, but became fluent in it and eventually translated the entire New Testament into the language. The Japanese written language is considered by many scholars to be the most difficult in the world because of its use of thousands of Chinese characters (giving multiple pronunciations of them while Chinese usually only has one), as well as two separate syllable alphabets.

Brown renewed his Bible translation career on the committee of the Motoyaku (“Original Translation”), but split with it amicably because of the insistence of the other missionaries on translating directly from the KJV instead of the original languages. Again, Brown disagreed with the committee since it transliterated “baptism” instead of translating it with a word meaning “immersion,” a stand he had learned from William Carey. Thus, he elected to translate his own NT with the help of Tetsuya Kawakatsu.

Interestingly enough, Brown’s goal was to get the Bible into the hands of the common man, so he innovated in two ways. First of all, he translated into the colloquial Japanese dialect used by the common citizen of the Kanto Plain rather than the classical Japanese used for all written documents in that era. Secondly, he elected not to use the difficult Chinese characters called kanji. (To this day the knowledge of several thousand kanji is considered necessary for a good education.) Instead, Brown elected to use the hiragana alphabet, usually used only for word endings.

Brown’s translation was reprinted several times. A revision of it by a missionary named White using the kanji characters was printed in 1886, and in 1894 Kawakatsu published his revision of Brown’s New Testament. In the meantime, the Motoyaku was a poor enough translation that a revision was brought out in 1917.

Brown died in Yokohama in 1886 after having spent his life for Christ both in helping to stamp out legal slavery in the American homeland and spiritual slavery on two different mission fields. He was truly an unsung hero of the faith!

Main sources: A History of Christianity in Japan, by Otis Cary, 1909; The Bible and Its Translation in Japan, by Akira Izumida, 1996.

 

I'm attaching a short history of the Japanese Bible that I wrote some years ago and revised a little in 2016. Enjoy!

 

Back in January of this year, my Japanese Bible translation partner went to Heaven. In honor of him, I did a thread of stories about him. Rather than posting here about him, I'll just give a link to that thread so you can enjoy the quixotic personality of this wonderful translator: In Memory of "Uncle Miya"

 

Somewhere in Africa: Betsy (not her real name) grew up in Africa as an MK (missionary kid). She learned to speak the language of a Muslim people group as well as her own language. God called her to be a missionary like her parents, and more specifically, God called her to translate the Bible for that people group.

Because of the civil war going on in her country, the missionaries must be very careful. In fact, last year a Baptist missionary new to the country was shot and killed in broad daylight on a major road in a large city. To further complicate things for Betsy, the people group she seeks to reach includes terrorists up in the north. But Betsy soldiers on, and has completed a number of books of the New Testament. "John and Romans" has been printed and is being distributed among the people. I have a copy of it here on my desk, given to me by the translator's proud father when I travelled there several years ago. I well remember visiting a poor family of that people group in their tiny hut with Betsy's father, who gave them a big bag of rice and witnessed of Christ in their language. What an awesome experience.

Around the world are other Christian heroes and heroines much like Betsy, translating the Bible into myriad languages. It is a huge and very difficult job to learn a foreign language, master the written language and the literary style, and translate the Bible. It takes many, many years, and 1000's of hours of work. Wannabes need not apply!

 

Good post. Thank you!

 

I have a friend who is an awesome linguist and translator. He has worked on Bible translations in both Mongolian and Spanish, and has consulted on others. Hard to imagine knowing that combination of languages! Well, he grew up as an MK in Latin America, so speaks Spanish like a native. And then learned Mongolian. Wow!

Years ago he took his family to live in Israel so he could learn Hebrew directly at the source. After getting there, they learned that their funds barely covered expenses. Also, they were told that they should buy bottled water because there were so many minerals in Israeli water. However, their limited funds did not allow that, so they drank tap water. Lo and behold, his wife ended up with kidney stones. However, when they got that checked out, the doctor discovered cancer! It was their monetary poorness that in God's providence allowed the cancer to be discovered and cured! God takes care of His servants, the translators.