12 Scholars Who Brought the Bible into Chinese
Each had unique translation philosophies, diction preferences, and intended audiences in mind, frameworks that informed how they approached their all-consuming work.
In the early morning of August 1, 1895, a brutal incident occurred in Fujian province, China. Hundreds of rioters ambushed a group of foreign Christian missionaries who were vacationing in the mountains, resulting in 11 deaths and five injuries. Among the martyred were several women and children, including a 13-month-old baby.
Coincidentally, on the same day the tragic news reached England, the British and Foreign Bible Society received a letter from a pastor from Fujian, pleading for the publication of a Bible written in a local dialect. The next year, the sister of one of the victims helped publish this Bible, and relatives and friends of the martyrs donated toward the publication costs in remembrance of the massacre.
The Kienning Colloquial Bible is only one of numerous Bible translations that began to appear starting in the 19th century and into the beginning of the 20th, due to the painstaking work of many Western and Chinese translators. The translators were often men, and no one knew how hard they worked better than their wives, who had to force their husbands to eat and sleep because of their never-ending ruminations.
Some of these projects focused on producing a literal word-for-word version of the Bible while others sought a colloquial style. In 1872, a team of 16 Western missionaries and several Chinese Christian experts began work on the Chinese Union Version (CUV) with the intent that it be “in the national language (not local vernacular), simple enough to be understood by people from all walks of life, and faithful to the original text without losing the rhythm of the Chinese language,” as Kevin Xiyi Yao, an expert in world Christianity and Asian studies, wrote for CT.
Below, we highlight 12 of the ...