It was the privilege of members of the Global Bible project team to travel to São Paulo for the Yale-Edinburgh conference on the theme for 2025, ‘Christianity, Democracy, and Nationalism.’ Approximately 100 delegates from all over the world met to discuss this challenging topic over three days, from 28 – 30 May 2025.
We thank our hosts at the Universidade Mackenzie, São Paulo, and the conference team of Pedro Feitoza, Sérgio Santos, Ronaldo Cavalcante, Suzana Coutinho, Adriano Godoy, Erika Helgen, and Helen Teixeira, for their hospitality and excellent organisation.
Photo of delegates from the final session
The journey from Bristol and Muenster to São Paulo was a big undertaking, but we were committed to participating in the first meeting of the Yale-Edinburgh conference in the global south. WIth its remarkable traffic, diverse population of Afro-Brazilian, Japanese and Portuguese heritage, this was the right place to be discussing the impact of colonalism on the Bible translation movement.
Hilary Carey, Ben Weber and Felicity Jensz
For our session, Hilary Carey discussed the progress of the project, and in particular the argument of Adrian Hastings that the creation of a national literature, especially a Bible in the mother tongue of a particular people, was a critical step in the creation of a national consciousness. She discussed this in relation to the case studies from Greenland, Ghana and Australia. While each translation project was a unique intellectual achievement, there was a wide variety of outcomes for the elevation of these Bibles to national significance.
Felicity Jensz’s paper, entitled ‘German Colonialism, the Global Bible and National Identity in the Age of Empire’, focused on micro studies from the German colonial world including the translations in Ewe in Togo, and work on the Duke of York Bible translations. She demonstrated that through a triangulation of sources we have been able to uncover the names and contributions of various local translators in the project of creating a global bible, thus contributing to the decolonisation of knowledge.
Benjamin Weber spoke on the Digital Humanities aspect of our project. He described the process of compiling a project data base from multiple sources to enable a large-view analysis of the spread of the bible translations over the nineteenth century and presented this digital tool.
Having completed our own contribution in the first session, this left us free to enjoy other contributions throughout the conference. Sessions were in both Portuguese and English, with Portugues sessions skillfully translated for the less linguistically adept. In this way we learnt about Christian nationalism in Lain America, and the unique identities created by religious minorities in regions as diverse as Hungary, Malta, and Ghana. Eric Miller introduced me to Milton Nascimento, the wildly popular singer songwriter and voice of Brazil. For the final session, Emma Wild-Wood had the unenviable task of summing up the main themes, and bidding us gather and return for the next Yale-Edinburgh meeting.
In between sessions, we continued to discuss the future of our own project, possible grant developments that can build on what we have done so far, and – with Ben Weber’s help – thinking about developing the Global Bible missionary map using AI to allow plain language queries of our data. We also visited the extraordinary Afro-Brazilian Museum which helped us gained further insight into this exciting city and its colonial heritage.
We are very sorry to be saying goodbye to Floris Solleveld, who has been the postdoctoral research associate working with the Bristol team on the Global Bible project for the last eighteen months.
Floris has made a splendid contribution to the project since joining us in September 2023. Among other tasks, he led on the Translating Colonialism conference, writing the call for papers and helping define its major theme. He has been active in searching out new and exciting archival sources in many, extended trips to archives in the UK, Germany and elsewhere in Europe. He has written a series of lively blog posts about these adventures, which you can read on this blog.
He now has a major article forthcoming with Global Intellectual History, which demonstrates his learning and scholarship and the rich possibilities for researchers accessing the linguistic resources of missionary and bible society archives. Look out for that soon.
For the next six months, Floris will be at the University of Amsterdam with a Senior Fellowship from the Vossius Centre for History of the Humanities and Sciences and an Allard Pierson Fellowship at the Amsterdam University Library Special Collections. Within that period he hopes to finish the revised manuscript of his book. In the fall he will be at the Warburg Institute in London with a Frances Yates Short-Term Fellowship.
Farewell Floris – and all the best for your future career.
In 1896 the first Deutsche Kolonialausstellung, German colonial exhibition, was held in Berlin. In line with the large international exhibitions of the nineteen century, the aim of this exhibition was to showcase the economic and political power of the German empire through the products and potential of the colonies. After political unification in 1871, it had become a formal colonial power from 1884. This exhibition was to showcase the advancements made in the first decade of German colonial rule.
Missions at the Berlin Colonial exhibition (Catalogue, page 124)
Among the objects exhibited were works from the Protestant missionary groups operating in the German colonies. These included the large German missionary groups such as the Berlin Mission, the Bethel Mission, the Leipzig Mission and the mission of the Moravian Church. The exhibit also showcased the work of non-German missionary societies that worked within the German colonies, such as the Australian Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society. The British Wesleyans had worked in New Guinea since 1857, long before the colonisation of the area by European states. From 1869 the Australian Wesleyans had taken over the mission work from the British sending out three European missionaries to work amongst peoples in Neu-Pommern, Neu-Lauenburg und Neu-Mecklenburg. Or, known by their English names, New Britain, Duke of York Island and New Ireland—part of the Bismarck Archipelago that would be placed under German colonial administration from 1884, first under the auspices of the New Guinea Company and from 1891 under formal German colonial control. By 1896 there were three local pastors and 117 local helpers working in the Wesleyan circuit on the Bismarck Archipelago. (Exhibition catalogue, p. 127).[1]
The objects on display in the Protestant mission section of the Berlin colonial exhibition in 1896 were texts or images, but explicitly no ethnographical objects, as it was assumed that other groups would display such items. In the catalogue, the Berlin-based missionary enthusiast and colonial propagandist Alexander Merensky, who had worked for the Berlin Mission in Southern Africa, wrote of the contributions of the Wesleyan mission in the Bismark Archipelago:
“Two extensive lexicons and grammars in the dialects of New Pomerania and New Lauenburg, written by Mr. Rickard and Mr. Brown, testify to the diligence that the missionaries had devoted to linguistic work. In both dialects there were reading books, hymn books, catechisms, translations of the Gospels and, in the Lauenburg dialect, the first two books of Moses.”[2]
The Brown referred to was the Englishman George Brown, who had lived a rather itinerate life before becoming a missionary for the Wesleyans, first in Samoa (1860-1874), where tensions between the Wesleyans and the London Missionary Society were high, and then in the Bismarck Archipelago from June 1875. He was accompanied by his wife, children and Fijian and Samoan teachers. Amongst the LMS and the Wesleyans it was a common strategy to take converted peoples from one island group to another in order to convert the populations of further islands to Christianity. This policy was in order to save money and European lives, and it also contributed to indigenous mobilities throughout the region.[3]
According to The book of a Thousand Tongues (1938/1972), which contains a list of all known bible translations, in part or in full, we read for the Duke of York Island that the language was spoken in Duke of York Island, in the New Britain group. That the first publication was St Mark’s Gospel in 1882 at Sydney by the BFBS and was translated by George Brown, of the Australian Wesleyan Missionary Society. In 1886, St. Matthew’s Gospel with portions of the Gospel of St. Luke and St. John and the Psalms were translated by Benjamin Danks and Isaac Rooney. In the same year, 1886, the Acts was printed in Brisbane from a translation by R.H. Richard.
Duke of York Island translations, from The Book of a Thousand Tongues (1972), 109
The translation of St. Mark occurred before the German colonial incursion into the Bismarck Archipelago, but this was not a matter that was explicitly noted in the catalogue, nor were the names of the local contributors to the bible translation.[4] As our project has demonstrated, the translation of the bible was only possible with the help of local people, however they are often not explicitly stated in official documentation, such as the Book of a Thousand Tongues.
Yet we know that local people were involved. In the minutes of the New South Wales Auxiliary of the British and Foreign Missionary Society in Sydney from 1882, a request is noted from the Wesleyan missionary society in which they ask if the “native Pandit [Pundit] from New Britain” could be paid for his work on the translation of the Bible into the language of the Duke of York island.[5] The request was not approved by the NSW BFBS, rather was deferred to the London BFBS.
Both the historians Helen Gardner and Margaret Reeson have independently named Peni Lelei as the man who was involved with Brown in the translation of the Gospel of Mark.[6] Brown himself notes that Peni Lelei was “my best pundit, and gave me great help in the work of translation.”[7] Yet his name is not mentioned in either the 1938 or 1972 version of the Book of a Thousand Tongues. During the 1880s, the third white missionary in what would become German New Guinea was Benjamin Danks, who worked there from 1878 until 1887. In his diary entry from 27 June 1879, he lists 20 male and 6 female students that he was teaching: the first name on the list is Peni Lelei.
Peni Lelei was from the village of Molot on the Duke of York Island; he was baptized on 8 December 1878 and was raised to the position of lay preacher in April 1880.[8] Together with Timot and George Brown, he worked on the Bible translation of the Duke of York language.[9] He died in February 1895.[10]
Tracey Banivanua Mar has noted that indigenous mobility between Pacific Islander and Australia was more frequent than commonly expressed, partly because there are only snippets of information available in the archives that point to the mobility of Indigenous peoples.[11] The same may be said for Melanesian language workers for the mission. Through his association with the mission, Peni Lelei with his wife and child departed for Sydney in January 1881 with Brown and his wife and child.[12]
Brown was recalled to Sydney in 1879 to explain his actions to the mission board, as he had led a punitive expedition in 1878 to revenge the murders of four Fijian mission teachers and pastors, including his travel companion Peni Luvu.[13] As Heinz Schütte has noted, these men were murdered and eaten by a Tolai alliance under the Big-Man Talali. The event subsequently changed the power balance in the area, alerted potential colonial administrations to the difficulties of the area and placed the assertive missionary endeavour in question.[14] The estimate of the number of people killed in the raids varies greatly, with Schütte suggesting between 90 to 100 people were killed in retribution, and Brown himself stating that not more than 10 people died.[15] Brown was eventually exonerated for his part in the punitive expedition without any disciplinary actions. In 1881 he returned to Sydney using the opportunity to work on the Duke of York translation.[16] Timot, another New Britain man, had also accompanied his, as too did Itione and wife, a Samoan couple, all arriving in Sydney in February 1881.[17] Brown wrote of the events:
“As soon as we were settled I began the work of translating one of the Gospels into the Duke of York language, I was very anxious indeed that this should be done, not only for the spiritual benefit of the people to whom it would be sent, but also as recording the results of our first studies of the language. I found Peni very useful in this work. He had, fortunately, some knowledge of English, and was also remarkably quick and intelligent. It was a great joy to me when this translation of the Gospel of St. Mark, the first one which had ever been made into any of the languages or dialects of New Britain, was in the hands of the natives, and it was also a great joy to me to receive from teachers and others testimonies as to its value.”[18]
This quote speaks both to the religious aims of translation as also to the scientific use that such a translation may be put to. Although Peni Lelei died in 1895, it is possible that an image of him, with his wife and child, was displayed in Berlin in 1896 amongst the 90 images that George Brown provided for the exhibition. Brown was known as a photographer, having purchased photographic equipment from a member of a naturalist expedition in 1875.[19] His images are to be found in the Ethnographical Museum in Berlin and also in the State Library of New South Wales, where one of his extant albums includes photographs including Duke of York Island, New Britain and New Ireland (Papua New Guinea), Samoa, Fiji and Tonga. The photos from the album in Sydney date from 1875 to 1881 and thus were taken prior to the Berlin colonial exhibition. The album consists of 90 images, including number 74 of “Peni Lelei and wife, Duke of York Island”.[20]
[2] Arbeitsausschuss der Deutschen Kolonial-Ausstellung, ed., Deutschland Und Seine Kolonien Im Jahr 1896. Amtlicher Bericht Über Die Erste Deutsche Kolonial-Ausstellung (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1867).: German original: „„Von den Fleiss, denn die Missionare auf sprachliche Arbeiten verwendet hatten, zeugten zwei umfangreiche Lexika und Grammatiken in Dialekten Neu-Pommerns und Neu-Lauenburgs, verfasst von den Herren Rickard und Brown. In beiden Dialekten waren vorhanden Lesebücher, Gesangbücher, Katechismen, Uebersetzungen der Evangelien und im Lauenburger Dialekt auch die ersten beiden Bücher Mosis.“
[3] Doug Munro and Andrew Thornley, eds., The Covenant Makers. . Islander Missionaries in the Pacific (Suva, Fiji: Pacific Theological College and the Institute of Pacific Studies at the University of the South Pacific, 1996).
[4] Moore Theological College [MTC], Samuel Marsden Archives [SMA], Sydney, AU AU-MTC 204-207/1, Minutes of the New South Wales (NSW) Auxiliary of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), NSW BFBS, Monthly Committee Meeting held on 19 April 1882.
[5] MTC, SMA, NSW BFBS Monthly Committee Meeting held on 19 April 1882.
[6] Helen Bethea Gardner, Gathering for God: George Brown in Oceania (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2006). p. 84. She states that Peni Lelei from the Duke Islands, helped translate the Gospel of St. Mark. (she does not give a footnote)]; See also: Margaret Reeson, Pacific Missionary George Brown, 1835-1917. Wesleyan Methodist Church (ANU Press: Canberra, 2012),
[7]George Brown, Pioneer-missionary and explorer, an autobiography; a narrative of forty-eight years’ residence and travel in Samoa, New Britain, New Ireland, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands Brown (Hodder and Stoughton: London, 1908), 378
[8] Margaret Reeson, Pacific Missionary George Brown, 1835-1917. Wesleyan Methodist Church (ANU Press: Canberra, 2012), 129; Brown, Pioneer-missionary and explorer, 378.
[9] Margaret Reeson, Pacific Missionary George Brown, 1835-1917. Wesleyan Methodist Church (ANU Press: Canberra, 2012), 166ff.
[10] Margaret Reeson, Pacific Missionary George Brown, 1835-1917. Wesleyan Methodist Church (ANU Press: Canberra, 2012), 220; cf. Australian Methodist Missionary Review, 5 February 1895
[11] Tracey Banivanua Mar, “Shadowing Imperial Networks: Indigenous Mobility and Australia’s Pacific Past”, Australian Historical Studies 46:3 (2015), 340-355.
[12] Brown, Pioneer-missionary and explorer, 194, 406.
[14] Schütte, Heinz. “The Six Day War of 1878 in the Bismarck Archipelago.” The Journal of Pacific History 24, no. 1 (1989): 38–53. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25168980.
[15] Schütte, Heinz. “The Six Day War of 1878 in the Bismarck Archipelago.” The Journal of Pacific History 24, no. 1 (1989): 38–53. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25168980, 43; “The Blanche Bay Massacre. REV. GEORGE BROWN’S STATEMENT”, The Maitland Mercury and Hunter River General Advertiser (NSW) Thursday 2 June 1881 – Page 3
[16] Brown, Pioneer-missionary and explorer, 194, 406.
[20] Reverend George Brown: Album of photographs including Duke of York Island, New Britain and New Ireland (Papua New Guinea), Samoa, Fiji and Tonga, ca. 1875-1881, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales: https://archival.sl.nsw.gov.au/Details/archive/110316387
Last week, international delegates from around the world met for the Translating Colonialism conference at Westminster College, University of Cambridge.
The conference was the major event for the second year of the Global Bible project, and has been over a year in the planning and thinking.
Congratulations and thank you to everyone who joined us for this event!
Delegates to the Translating Colonialism Conference, Westminster College Cambridge, 7-8 November 2024.
Papers were organised into panels which corresponded roughly to geographical and chronological themes, though the range and diversity of topics and approaches was a key feature of the conference.
The conference began with a short presentation by the Global Bible team, both the Münster strand led by Felicity Jensz and Michael Wandusim (who was unfortunately not able to attend) and the Bristol strand, with Hilary Carey, Floris Solleveld, and Mei Mei Cheung. This outlined the origins of the project and its focus on three case study regions in colonial West Africa, Oceania, and the Arctic, but with the conference extending that to include participants presenting on bible translation in China, Russia, India and across a wider time frame, from the early Christian era to the modern day.
For the first panel, Daniel Jeyaraj (Liverpool Hope) and Hepzibah Israel (Edinburgh) took us to Tamil Nadu. Jeyaraj discussed the Danish Lutheran missionaries who undertook the first translations into Tamil in the Danish colony of Tranquebar. Israel analysed the translated bible for its materiality and as an icon for the translation process, with a series of striking illustrations including Bible colporteurs and Bible women in colonial India.
Delegates reviewing the drawings by Manfred Wkeng Aseng at the Translating Colonialism conference.
The second panel included a number of technological challenges and included a presentation from Benjamin Weber on behalf of the Münster digital humanities team on the missionary map. The missionary map is one of the outputs from the Global Bible project, building on an initial template from the Book of a Thousand Tongues, edited by Eric North (1938) and later by Eugene Nida (1972), with permission from the United Bible Society. There was a lively discussion of aspects of the map as a tool for future researchers, with valuable contributions made by Neil Rees (United Bible Society).
Two artistic commissions followed this presentation. Leeza Awojobi, a Bristol-based poet and storyteller, provided a poem and video reflection on the heritage of her family, originally from the former German colony of Cameroon and her ‘lost’ mother tongue of Kpwe (Mokpwe). This was followed by the work of the New Guinea artist Manfred Wkeng Aseng, and the coming of Anglican missions to his home place of Kaironk in the highlands, depicted using traditional images.
Manfred Wkeng Aseng, drawing of his brother’s travels from Kaironk in the PNG highlands (bottom right corner) to Simbai, Madang, Popendetta and St Paul’s and St Peter’s cathedral in Dogura (top right corner).
Onesimus Ngundu, for Cambridge University Library, presented on the library and archives of the British and Foreign Bible Society. This was followed by presentations on aspects of translation from two different times and perspectives: Tyler Horton (Cambridge) on strategies for translating the Hebrew term ruah (רוּחַ) ( ‘wind’ ‘breath’ ‘spirit’) in the Septuagint, and Uchenna Oyali (Abuja) on the changing meaning of nsọ (‘holiness’/ sacred/ unclean), a word with both positive and negative connotations, in Igbo bible translation.
For the final session of the day, Brian Stanley (Edinburgh) analysed the meaning of the term ‘heathen’ and questioned whether the derogatory connotations of this term had any real world impact on the social demarcation of race in colonial societies. Laura Rademaker (ANU, Canberra) took us to post-colonial era in supposedly decolonised Australia. Through her analysis of the bilingual school policy in the Northern Territory she noted the long tail of missionary education, which persisted long after the formal work of missions in settler countries had passed. Mia Jacobs (Bristol) analysed the meaning of biblical references to menstruation in Leviticus and the woman with the twelve-year flow (Matthew 9:20-22; Mark 5:25-34; Luke 8:43-48) to question pejorative interpretations of the status of menstruation in both the ancient world and today.
We enjoyed an excellent conference dinner at Galleria in Cambridge – readying us for another day of talks.
De Valera Botchway (Cape Coast) led the morning discussion with a challenge to understand the full meaning of traditional religious terms, as they were translated into new biblical contexts. His example was the Tiwi (Akan) term nyamesom pa which he argued was mistranslated to mean ‘religion’ as a practice set apart from other parts of life. He argued that traditionally there was no such distinction, and that translation into a western idiom undercut older life- and knowledge-ways. John Ekem (Accra) examined the earliest mother tongue translaters of the bible on the Gold Coast through the work of Christian Protten and Jacobus Capitein. He argued that they were more than translaters but necessarily acted as cultural mediators providing dynamic interpretations of language to meet the new needs of the times. Toon van Hal (Leuven), analysing the compilation of translations of the Lord’s Prayer, explained that this practice reflected in miniature the global bible project, and provided insights into the developing understanding of global languages, and the relationship between scholarly and mission-driven linguistics.
For the sixth panel, Holger Strutwolf (Münster) returned us to the earliest centuries of Christianity, pointing out through a rich selection of examples, that issues of translation and the editing of scripture are not new but are inherent in the transmission of scripture into new languages. In two complementary papers, Lisa Kerl (Münster) examined the role of German-speaking missionaries and the challenge of translating the bible into classical Chinese in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; Anastasia Akulich (Leeds) considered the work of Russian Orthodox missionaries and their close engagement with Chinese Orthodox Christians and the extent to which the latter were effectively independent agents in the work of translation.
James Wyld. The World: designed to show the languages and dialects into which the BFBS has translated the scriptures. 2nd ed, 1841
The final session brought together papers from the two global bible project teams. Floris Solleveld outlined how the global translation project of the BFBS and affiliated societies resulted in a virtual as well as a physical world map of languages, as well as in massive repositories of linguistic data. Felicity Jensz examined the connections between German and British Bible Societies in colonial West Africa, highlighting the significant achievement and contribution of mother tongue translators to the present day. Finally, Judith Becker provided a summing up and review of the proceedings across two days of intense discussion.
The final activity for delegates was to take the short walk to Cambridge University Library to visit a display of items from the British and Foreign Bible Society. Selected by Floris Solleveld, these highlighted the work of Indigenous and mother tongue translators from many cultures, as well as archival and printed objects showing the history and progress of individual bible translation projects, as well as the 1841 copy of Wyld’s Map of the world, with all the languages into which the BFBS had translated the bible.
Over 50 people attended a workshop on 2 July 2024 at the Institute for Distance Learning (IDL) Amonoo-Neizer Conference Centre at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in Kumasi, Ghana, to discuss aspects surrounding histories, legacies and dissemination of mother-tongue Bibles.
In Ghana, German and British Bible Societies facilitated some of the first translations of the Bible into mother tongues in the nineteenth century. As Michael Wandusim has demonstrated on his work on Ludwig Adzaklo, Ghanaian scholars have been an integral part of historical translation work, yet often overlooked in the histories of Bible translations. The GloBil project is committed to making a contribution to the decolonisation of knowledge surrounding the histories and legacies of mother-tongue Bible translations and in this spirit we—Michael Wandusim and Felicity Jensz—co-organized a workshop with our colleague Prof. J. E. T. Kuwornu-Adjaottor of the Department of Religious Studies, KNUST, in Kumasi, Ghana.
The first session of the workshop was focused on the history of Bible translations and Bible societies, including an overview of the GloBil project (Jensz/Wandusim), the history of Bible translations in West Africa (Ekem) and the textual histories of the original Greek sources of the New Testament (Strutwolf). This session provided context into the deep historical tradition of Bible translations and transcriptions.
In sessions dedicated to the reception and dissemination of Bible translations, a wide range of topics were covered, including the question of how mother-tongue Bibles reflect African spirituality (Afriyie), as well as specific examples of Bible translations for the Bono-Twi (Boaheng) and Dangme (Kuwornu-Adjaottor) languages. Several papers focused on mother-tongue biblical hermeneutics, including the history and focus of different directions of mother-tongue biblical hermeneutics in Ghana (Aryeh), mother-tongue biblical hermeneutics as decolonized knowledge production for social transformation (Amevenku), and the centrality of mother-tongue Bibles to the religious landscape of Ghana (Torsu). The processes behind the distribution of Bibles in Ghana today were also presented in a paper (Worae), which highlighted some of the historical processes still used today as well as some of the newer forms of Bible dissemination, including through digital means.
The rich presentations over the day demonstrated the value of the collaborative workshop and provided insights into many aspects of mother-tongue Bibles that will be reflected in further outputs of the project, including future blogs and also publications. Of particular note was the display of mother-tongue Bibles of many Ghanian languages, some of which have historical legacies dating back to the nineteenth century. The workshop was made possible by our KNUST collaborator Prof. J. E. T. Kuwornu-Adjaottor, helped by his two assistants Peter Adams and Ernest Frimpong Junior. We were generously financed through the Internationalization Fund of the University of Münster.
