Bible Translation in Africa and Asia

The Bible in African and Asian Christianity

From 27-29 June I attended a conference on this very important topic at the Creative Campus of Liverpool Hope University.

 Professor Daniel Jeyaraj who organised and led the event is Director of the Andrew Walls Centre for the Study of African and Asian Christianity at Hope. Professor Andrew Walls, a Methodist, is highly respected internationally as an expert on mission history and theology. Attendees came from nineteen countries.

The Jerusalem Bible translation appeared fifty years ago so we began with an excellent evening lecture by Dom Henry Wansborough who surveyed the history of English Bible translations and explained how the Jerusalem Bible came about. He outlined its strengths and weaknesses and suggested areas for improvement and updating. For example, JB Old Testament uses Yahweh for the divine name but is likely to be replaced by LORD as in most other modern versions.

Asia and Africa occupied us for the next day and a half. Professor Walls gave two fascinating sessions on Bible translation and interpretation in early nineteenth century China with the pioneer work of Robert Morrison and the extreme way the Bible was used by some of the Taiping revolutionaries. Other speakers described how the famous Chinese evangelists, Wang Mingdao and John Sung handled the Bible in their mid twentieth century ministries. Professor Jeyaraj who comes originally from South India told the story of the Tamil Bible.

Bible translation in Africa was covered from many angles for the rest of the conference. The original use of the Bible in African Independent churches was vividly described by several speakers. Other scholars dealt with Nigeria, South Africa and Botswana. We also heard about the history and present situation of Biblical studies in Egypt. A Ghanaian Methodist minister now serving in South Wales gave expert evaluations of translations of Amos in Ghanaian languages. Altogether, we listened to a rich variety of contributions.

My presentation was on Edwin Smith (1876-1957), a prolific author 

   who had been a Bible translator in Africa and in the 1930s directed Bible translation at the British and Foreign Bible Society. Smith held that translations should be faithful to the original languages, understandable to the reader and beautiful in style, a difficult and challenging art. He emphasised the recipients need to understand and experimented with versions in Simplified and Basic English for new readers. His approach helped to open the way for the reader friendly translations that we enjoy today. The talk was well received and I hope it will appear in due course on the Methodist Heritage website.

There were excellent meals and welcome breaks for tea and coffee so we had plenty of time for networking and interaction with specialists from many places. After it closed I had a couple of hours before my train and visited the Metropolitan Cathedral, a remarkable building, modern, circular and with excellent use of light, especially from the central lantern window.