By one common estimate, in 1800 the Bible, in whole or in part, had been printed in about seventy languages, most of them European. By 1900 the number was several hundred. No century before had seen anything like it. The change was driven by two new things: societies that existed only to print and distribute Bibles, and a wave of Protestant missionaries who learned languages that had rarely or never been written down.

This article tells that story, honestly. It was an age of great effort and real achievement. It was also an age of empire, and much of the work credited to famous missionaries was done with, and sometimes largely by, people whose names were never printed on the title page.

Mary Jones and the Bible Society

The best-known story about the beginning of the Bible societies is about a Welsh girl, Mary Jones (1784–1864). As it is usually told, Mary, the daughter of a weaver, saved for six years to buy a Welsh Bible, and in 1800, aged fifteen, walked some twenty-five miles barefoot across the mountains to Bala to buy one from the Methodist minister Thomas Charles. Charles had none left to sell, but was so moved that he gave her one of his own copies. Her story, the account goes on, inspired him to call for a society to supply Bibles to Wales and the world.

Mary Jones was a real person, and her Bible survives in the Bible Society’s collections. But the familiar version of the story was written down decades after the event, in Victorian books for children and Sunday schools, and it gathered details along the way. The records of the time do not show that her story was what moved Charles to act, and historians treat the link between Mary Jones and the founding of the Bible Society as tradition rather than established fact.

What is certain is this. Welsh Bibles were scarce and expensive. In December 1802, Charles raised the need at a meeting of the Religious Tract Society in London. The Baptist minister Joseph Hughes is said to have replied that if a society were formed for Wales, why not for the world? On 7 March 1804 the British and Foreign Bible Society was founded in London.

“Without note or comment”

The new society had one simple rule: it would print and distribute the Bible “without note or comment.” That rule mattered. Anglicans, Methodists, Baptists, Congregationalists and others disagreed about many things, but they could all agree to print the text alone. By leaving out notes, the society avoided taking sides between denominations, and it allowed churches that would never otherwise cooperate to work together.

The rule had limits. In the 1820s a bitter dispute arose over the Apocrypha, which many continental Bibles included. After long argument, the British society decided in 1826 not to fund Bibles that contained it, which strained its relations with churches in Europe.

Similar societies sprang up quickly. The American Bible Society was founded in New York in 1816, with Elias Boudinot as its first president, and national societies appeared across Europe. They funded translations, printed them cheaply in enormous numbers and sent agents, called colporteurs, to sell them on foot.

William Carey and Serampore

The first great name among the missionary translators is William Carey (1761–1834), an English shoemaker and Baptist pastor who taught himself languages. He sailed to India in 1793. In 1800 he settled at Serampore, a Danish trading post near Calcutta, with Joshua Marshman and the printer William Ward.

Carey’s Bengali New Testament appeared in 1801. Over the next three decades the Serampore press produced complete Bibles or parts of the Bible in about forty languages and dialects of South Asia and beyond, as well as grammars and dictionaries. Carey also taught Bengali and Sanskrit at the College of Fort William in Calcutta.

The output was astonishing, but its quality was uneven. Many of the translations were made quickly, often by Indian scholars, called pandits, working from Bengali, Sanskrit or other versions under missionary supervision, and several were later judged to be barely understandable and were replaced. Carey knew this. He revised his Bengali New Testament repeatedly over his life. His chief helper in his early Bengali work, Ram Ram Basu, is one of the few Indian collaborators whose name is often remembered.

Henry Martyn

Henry Martyn (1781–1812) was a brilliant Cambridge scholar who went to India as a chaplain of the East India Company. He translated the New Testament into Hindustani, the language now known as Urdu, completing it around 1810. He then travelled to Shiraz in Persia to revise a Persian New Testament with the help of local scholars, chief among them Mirza Sayyid Ali. Martyn died on his way home, in Tokat in Asia Minor, in 1812, at the age of thirty-one. His Urdu New Testament, published after his death, remained in use for a long time, and his journals made him a model for later missionaries.

Robert Morrison and the Chinese Bible

Robert Morrison (1782–1834) of the London Missionary Society reached Canton in 1807, at a time when teaching Chinese to foreigners was forbidden and his teachers worked at personal risk. He did not start from nothing: before leaving England he had copied a manuscript translation of much of the New Testament made by an earlier Catholic missionary, Jean Basset, and preserved in the British Museum.

Morrison’s New Testament was printed in 1814. With William Milne he translated the Old Testament, and their complete Bible appeared in 1823. At almost the same time, Marshman at Serampore, working with Johannes Lassar, completed a rival Chinese Bible. Both were pioneering and both were criticised for awkward style. Chinese Bible translation went through many more versions before the Chinese Union Version of 1919 became the standard Protestant Bible, as it largely remains.

Adoniram Judson and Robert Moffat

The American Baptist Adoniram Judson (1788–1850) arrived in Burma in 1813. During the first Anglo-Burmese war he was imprisoned for nearly two years in terrible conditions. A well-known story says that his wife Ann Hasseltine Judson sewed his manuscript translation into a pillow to keep it safe; the story is told in early biographies, and the details vary. Judson completed his translation of the Bible in 1834. Revised by him, it remains the basis of the most widely used Burmese Protestant Bible.

In southern Africa, Robert Moffat (1795–1883) of the London Missionary Society spent most of his life at Kuruman, translating into Setswana. His New Testament appeared in 1840 and his complete Bible in 1857, printed on the mission press. Moffat worked over decades with Batswana speakers, and the translation shaped written Setswana.

The unnamed translators

Each of these famous names hides a team. Missionaries depended on teachers, language helpers, scribes, printers and early converts who knew the language from birth. Missionaries usually supervised and published; native speakers often supplied the language itself. In many cases their names are lost. Where they were recorded, as with Ram Ram Basu or Mirza Sayyid Ali, they were often treated as assistants rather than as fellow translators.

A few African and Asian translators did become well known in their own right. Samuel Ajayi Crowther (about 1809–1891), who had been freed from a slave ship as a boy and became the first African Anglican bishop, led work on the Yoruba Bible, completed in the 1880s.

What did translation do?

Historians disagree about how to judge this movement. For many years mission history was told as a story of heroic individuals. Later critics saw it as part of European colonialism: missionaries chose which dialect to write, invented spellings, and brought foreign ideas with the books.

The Gambian-born historian Lamin Sanneh offered an influential third view. He argued that Christianity is unusually “translatable”: it has no single sacred language, and so when missionaries translated the Bible into a local language they gave that language a new dignity, whatever their own intentions. Translations created written literatures, preserved vocabularies and gave readers the means to interpret the Bible for themselves, sometimes against the missionaries. Andrew Walls made similar arguments about the “translation principle” in Christian history. Critics reply that Sanneh underplayed the power of missions and colonial governments over which languages and dialects were written and taught. Both points are true in different places.

A movement that continues

The Bible societies still exist, and since 1946 they have cooperated as the United Bible Societies. The work they began continues, now led largely by translators translating into their own languages (see Translating for every language today).

Open Word Bible is a small part of this long history. It shares the conviction that scripture belongs in every language, and its free CC0 licence follows the same instinct that led the early societies to print Bibles as cheaply as possible. It also takes a lesson from the unnamed translators: in its records, every reviewer will be named.

Sources

  • Howsam, Leslie. Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
  • Batalden, Stephen, Kathleen Cann, and John Dean, eds. Sowing the Word: The Cultural Impact of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1804–2004. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2004.
  • Fea, John. The Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
  • Stanley, Brian. The History of the Baptist Missionary Society, 1792–1992. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992.
  • Daily, Christopher A. Robert Morrison and the Protestant Plan for China. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013.
  • Sanneh, Lamin. Translating the Message: The Missionary Impact on Culture. 2nd ed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2009.
  • Walls, Andrew F. The Missionary Movement in Christian History: Studies in the Transmission of Faith. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996.
  • Hastings, Adrian. The Church in Africa, 1450–1950. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.