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The Cansteinsche Bibelanstalt: The oldest German Bible Society

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Title page of the 20th edition of the Canstein Bible, pubished in Halle 1728. Image: Bible Museum, Münster.

by Sven Heidenreich, Student Research Assistant

When people think of the systematic translation and distribution of the Bible, the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) certainly comes to mind. It was the largest of all Bible Societies in the nineteenth century. Originally founded in 1804, it set itself the task of bringing the Bible in the local language and at a low price to people who were normally dependent on the interpretation of the Bible by the clergy. These ideas were not limited to the English-speaking world.  

Title page of the 20th edition of the Canstein Bible, pubished in Halle 1728. Image: Bible Museum, Münster.
Title page of the 20th edition of the Canstein Bible, pubished in Halle 1728. Image: Bible Museum, Münster.

The history of German Bible societies, which pursued very similar goals to the British counterparts, is less researched and therefore less known. This is slightly surprising given that the first German Bible Society was established in 1710, almost a century before the BFBS. The Cansteinsche Bibelanstalt had the aim of producing low-cost Bibles for the masses, just as the BFBS would later do.  

The Reformation movement is an important historical background to the founding of German Bible Societies. During that period, in addition to rejecting the sale of indulgences, the elitist interpretation of the Bible was also criticized. Before the Reformation, Bibles were almost exclusively in Latin, which few people could read, write, or even understand. Although Martin Luther’s (1483-1546) translation of the Bible was printed and sold in German in 1534, it remained too expensive for most people to afford. Furthermore, after the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), the availability and ownership of Bibles significantly decreased. The religious historian Wilhelm Gundert (1987) estimates that in Protestant territories, there was only one Bible for every 70 inhabitants. 

Before the Reformation, the general population were dependent on the interpretations and readings of the Catholic clergy in order to learn the Word of God. Yet, in the post-Reformation environment some people strove to change this. One important person was Baron Karl Hildebrand von Canstein (1667-1719), who wished for the Bible to be more accessible. Although von Canstein is often associated with the idea of Bible societies, he himself referred to similar endeavours in the Netherlands, where the idea of using standing type (in German Stehsatz or Schiebesatz) to reduce printing costs was already in practice. Inspired by the desire to make the Bible accessible, he outlined his ideas for a Bible society in his 1710 pamphlet “Ohnmaßgeblicher Vorschlag / Wie GOTTES Wort den Armen zur Erbauung um einen geringen Preis in die Hand zu bringen” (Authoritative Proposal / How to bring the Word of God into the hands of the poor for their edification at a low price). 

In order to underscore his agenda, von Canstein quoted Jesus from the Gospel of Luke 11: 52: “Woe to you experts in the law, because you have taken away the key to knowledge. You yourselves have not entered, and you have hindered those who were entering.” Accordingly, no profit was to be made from the sale of the Bibles, as this would undermine the integrity of the organisation, which saw itself as a successor to the apostles. 

The brief interpretation of Col. 3:17 (“Let the word of Christ dwell among you richly in all wisdom”) that von Canstein used in the introduction of his 1710 pamphlet illustrates the ideals of the project and as such can be seen as one of the foundational principles on which all subsequent Bible societies were to be built. The original proposal discussed the extent to which the appeal for donations should be used to print and distribute the Bible and insisted that the funds were not to be used to improve the material conditions of the poor. Furthermore, plans to translate the Bible into other languages were also discussed. However, as the printing of the Bible was already an expensive undertaking this idea was not realised.  

Von Canstein followed up the agenda in his pamphlet with a call for participation and an appeal for donations, to ensure that at least some of the Christian teachings reached the poorer sections of the population. Although the appeal for donations was only moderately successful, the funds were sufficient to get the project off the ground. On 21 October 1710, the first ‘Canstein’ Bible was printed in the printing house of the Frankesche Stiftungen and orphanage in Halle. Halle itself was a centre for Pietism, a movement within Lutheranism that focused on biblical doctrine and individual Christian piety. Initially, a specially printed version of the New Testament was to be sold for two Groschen. As soon as the capital for a standing set of the entire Bible was available, the complete Bible was to be sold for ten Groschen. Although the institution that printed the Bibles was known as the Cansteinsche Bibelanstalt, the establishment of the institution was not von Canstein’s work alone, rather he benefited from the support of the Pietist theologian August Hermann Francke (1663-1727) and his colleague Heinrich Julius Elers (1667-1728), who both were integral to the development and realisation of the proposal.  

Von Canstein was needed not only as a financial backer, but also as a prominent figure to inform the public about the project and to provide legitimacy for the project. The daily operation also required a well-thought-out organisation that had to reconcile the goal of disseminating Bibles to as many people as possible at a reasonable price with the difficulties of running a not-for-profit organisation. For example, the booksellers who were commissioned to sell the Canstein Bibles for the fixed price now had to forfeit the turnover that could be achieved with the regular sale of, for example, commercial versions of the Bible. In addition, the number of Bibles sold had to be monitored in order to estimate the next printing orders. The Cansteinsche Bibelanstalt thus required a well conceptualised network of different agents particularly. These included typesetters who transformed corrections of the Luther Bible into printed form, and various booksellers who were necessary for storage and sales. Moreover, as the demand grew, more printing presses beyond that at the Franckesche Stiftungen were included in the network as that one alone could hardly cope with the great demand for cheap Bibles on its own. Threats of bankruptcy hung over the Cansteinsche Bibelanstalt, resulting in the need to constantly raise more funds. Amongst other things, this financially precarious situation meant that the plans to translate the Bible into other languages could not be realised.  

One could speculate that if the Cansteinsche Bibelanstalt had been able to realise the project of translating the Bible into other languages, it would have assumed a similar significance for the eighteenth century as the BFBS did for the nineteenth century. The latter provided the decisive impetus for the increased founding and networking of Bible societies outside England, as it was able to offer financial and organisational support.  

Yet, even without publishing foreign Bibles, the Cansteinsche Bibelanstalt made a significant impact on the German religious landscape. By 1800, more than 2.7 million Bibles and New Testaments had been printed in the German lands alone. Moreover, the establishment of the Cansteinsche Bibelanstalt in the early eighteenth century was a model for other Bible societies in the nineteenth century to follow, with the idea of making Bibles affordable to all being a driving force behind subsequent Bible societies. 

Sources: 

Gundert, Wilhelm (1987): Geschichte der deutschen Bibelgesellschaften im 19. Jahrhundert, Bielefeld: Luther-Verlag 

Howsam, Leslie (1991) Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society (Cambridge Studies in Publishing and Printing. 

Schicketanz, Peter (2001): Carl Hildebrand Freiherr von Canstein. Leben und Denken in Quellendarstellungen, Tübingen: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen Halle 

Language and the Missionary World Map: Platt’s and Radley’s histories of the BFBS

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Two unpublished histories of the British and Foreign Bible Society were written in the 1820s to 1830s (BFBS Archives, Cambridge University Library, GBR/0374/BFBS/BSA/E3/8/1 and E3/8/2). It is unclear to me why there were two, both by BFBS staff, written at roughly the same time; they cover much the same topics, figures, and languages and do not express notably strong or divergent views. What is clearer is why they were never published. Both manuscripts are very lengthy compilations of excerpts, transcripts, summaries, and in the case of the largest manuscript, of literal cutting and pasting from printed BFBS reports. All that material is arranged by language, with a chapter for each language into which the Bible was translated before or during that period, and no attempt at overarching narrative or analysis.

The biggest of the two manuscripts – in 15 volumes and envelopes of some 200 quarto pages each – was compiled by Thomas Pell Platt, the BFBS librarian between 1822-1831 and editor of its Greek, Amharic, and Ethiopic (Geez) versions. By far the largest chapter, filling two half-volumes, is taken up by the Serampore Mission. Serampore was a Danish colony near Calcutta, where a trio of Baptist missionaries churned out the unlikely number of 34 translations between 1800-1837 (i.e. in part before the BFBS was founded). What makes the chapter so large is also that it is largely a collage of the successive printed reports of the Serampore Brethren – reports that are otherwise hard to find even in Cambridge University Library. The same goes for Platt’s chapter about Sinhalese (the main language of Sri Lanka), where disagreements between missionaries turned into a veritable translation war. This recycling process makes Platt’s history a valuable historical source even despite its lack of originality.

Comparative vocabulary from Radley’s History of the BFBS

The other manuscript, though also filling 15 octavo notebooks, is considerably more condensed, enough so to fit into a single archive box. Its author is listed as John Radley, about whom less is known. Still the linguistic information is generally much richer than in Platt’s larger volumes: Radley provides comparative vocabularies and samples of alphabets as well as sketch language maps of Sulawesi and the upper Ganges region. More than Platt, he is inclined to cite and draw his information from recent non-missionary sources; his focus is on the missionary frontier in South/East Asia, whereas half of Platt’s history is devoted to larger and smaller European languages. Accordingly, Radley mixes missionary history with late enlightenment ethnography, taken from the works of British scholar-administrators in India and Indonesia (Colebrooke, Marsden, Raffles, Crawfurd).

What both manuscripts show us is how Bible translation resulted in a linguistic world map. Though written by philologically versed authors, neither was intended as a language encycylopaedia; but they contribute as least as much to our understanding of linguistic dynamics as of missionary history, and with its collection of linguistic ‘specimens’, Radley’s history leans towards a missionary Mithridates. The sheer multilingual scope and – sometimes misguided – optimism of the more industrious translators is staggering. In March 1810, the linguistic prodigy John Leyden promised to deliver gospels in “Siamese, Macassar, Bugis, Afghan or Pushtoo, Rakheng, Moldivian & Jaghatai” (accordingly grouped into one chapter in Platt’s history, although they belong to different regions and language families). With the aid of an unspecified number of “persons who assist Leyden in his literary researches” he estimated that “a year and a half might be sufficient for completing the Afghan, Jaghatai, and Siamese versions, and most probably the Bugis and Macasar” – and true enough, before his untimely death on Java 17 months later, he had pulled off complete gospels in Maldivian, Mark and Matthew in Pashtu, and Mark in Balochi, Makassarese, and Bugis, the latter two delayed by illness of his interpreter.

Leyden’s list of translations, from Platt’s History

Sometimes that optimism was sheer naïveté. Joshua Marshman, one of the Serampore trio of translators, cheerfully announced that he was first translating Confucius with the aid of the Chinese Armenian Joannes Lassar (Hovhannes Ghazarian) and an unnamed ‘Chinese assistant’, and then using the knowledge of Chinese thus acquired in translating the Bible. For all his insistence on method and autopsy, he never set foot in China; it is unsurprising that Chinese converts were rather won by other versions, like that of Karl Gützlaff and Robert Morrison (a work that inadvertently inspired the Taiping Rebellion, a mid-century syncretic millenarian movement that left 10-20 million Chinese dead). William Carey’s Marathi version fell flat for the plain reason that his munshi spoke ‘corrupt’ or nonstandard Marathi. But even Carey’s Sanskrit Bible, though more of a status object than a practical tool for proselytization, had its uses as a matrix for other translations.

 

Triangulation and Translation War

The story of Sinhalese, narrated in detail by both Platt and Radley, is illustrative in this regard, and in other ways. A first translation had been made in the early 18th century by the Dutch clergyman Willem Konijn, which was judged too plain as well as “unintelligible, formed according to the Dutch idiom, and not according to the Cingalese” by the Wesleyan missionaries after the British annexation of the colony. A colonial administrator with a passion for languages, William Tolfrey, undertook a new version with the aid of the converted Buddhist priest Abraham de Thomas and other (ex-)Buddhist clerics. To ensure that the new version was less foreign and more up to Sinhalese literary standards, a parallel version was made in Pali, the holy language of Theravada Buddhism:

To judge of the extent & appreciate the merit of Mr Tolfrey’s labours, it ought to be stated, that he carried forward the Cingalese translation in connexion with a second translation of Dr Carey’s version of the Sanscrit version into Pali; judging it expedient to render every verse into the Pali before it could be revised with effect in the Cingalese. The old Cingalese text was then revisited – it was afterwards compared with the Pali, & also with the excellent Tamul translation of Fabricius; in which the form of expression is so much alike, as to run easily from the Pali into the Cingalese: – but all with continual reference to the original Greek, & our own English version. The Pali though hereafter a work of great utility, only served at present to give precision & clearness to the Cingalese version.

That is from Radley’s History, notebook VI. More detail on the translation process is provided in Platt’s chapter on Pali:

The Pali translation is conducted in this manner. Mr Tolfrey reads from the text of Dr Carey’s Sanskrit Testament a certain number of verses to Don Abraham de Thomas, who writes the whole passage in Pali, as nearly as the idiom of that kindred language will admit. They afterward read over the Pali together, compare it verse by verse with the Sanskrit, and make any correction which in their judgement may be necessary. The Bengalee version is also often consulted in difficult passages, when the Sanskrit phrases are not easily expressed in Pali.

Moreover, their Pali version was used as a matrix by “two learned priests of Matura, Karratote Unnanse, and Bowila Unnanse […] who are both ignorant of English, and totally unacquainted with the Scriptures” for translating several chapters into common Sinhalese, so that it would be “perfectly intelligible to the natives, and free from all improper phrases or expressions borrowed from the English or Dutch languages”. Tolfrey sadly died in early 1817, with half the work done; fortunately for the BFBS, a committee of four missionaries who had been taught by Tolfrey stepped in to set forth his translation, following his ‘style &c.’ as closely as possible, and completed it by 1823.

That was not the end of the story. If Konijn’s version had been too plain, the new version was now criticized for being too difficult for ordinary Sinhalese, who needed a glossary. A remark in the BFBS reports that “The Natives of Ceylon were under the dominion of Europeans for two hundred and fifty years before their conquerors gave them any part of the word of God” provoked an angry letter from the Dutch Bible Society. CMS missionary Samuel Lambrick and three of his brethren protested against the new version because the Word should be for the poor, and because the new version used concepts and honorifics that were Buddhist in origin, thus importing heathenism into the holy writ. The local Bible Society invited Lambrick to provide his own version of six chapters of Matthew, which were not met with approval, after which he ended up publishing a simplified Sinhalese Book of Common Prayer and a Sinhalese Grammar at the Church Mission Press.

 

Time, Souls, and Money

There is no direct correlation between the time and effort involved in these translations and their impact. Although the Ceylon mission proudly claimed to have 10,000 native children in mission schools by the 1820s, with enough demand for 50,000 if there had been enough missionary teachers, Buddhism is still by far the majority religion on Sri Lanka, and most Sri Lankan Christians nowadays are Catholics. The first Javanese translation (1829), by the Baptist missionary Gottlob Brückner, though completed in the early 1820s, was held up by technical difficulties and the Java War (1825-30), and finally printed at Serampore, only to blocked by Dutch colonial authorities who wanted to avoid causing new unrests. The Dutch Bible Society’s own version was two more decades in the making, only to be eclipsed later by a less philological BFBS rival version. On the whole, missionary efforts were much more effective where they sought to replace Indigenous religions, like in Oceania, than when they were up against other ‘world religions’ with literary canons like Hinduism, Buddhism, and especially Islam. Inspired by the success of the LMS mission on Tahiti, and given the great similarities between Polynesian languages, the BFBS sought to save time and effort by using Tahitian as a lingua franca for other parts of Polynesia, but this turned out to be harder than expected.

The Gospels in Amharic, tr. Abu Rumi, ed. Thomas Pell Platt, 1824

A case in which Platt was personally involved as an editor, although he does not mention his own role, was Amharic. In 1820 there were painstaking negotiations (mediated through the French Orientalist mogul Sylvestre de Sacy and the British consul in Cairo) with the ex-priest and dragoman Jean-Louis Asselin de Cherville who wanted to sell a manuscript of a complete Amharic Bible translation for £ 1500. The BFBS offered only £ 750, which was already more than its standard fee of £ 500, in spite of doubts about a translation made by one man and not directly from Greek and Hebrew. In fact it had not been made by Asselin but by the Ethiopian priest Abu Rumi who lived with him in Cairo; in Ethiopia, Amharic was traditionally the language of the court whereas Geez was the language of the Bible. Eventually, Asselin and the BFBS agreed upon £ 1250, and the 9539-page manuscript was inspected by its indefatigable philological factotum, Professor Samuel Lee. (Apart from the details about the negotiations, the story can be read at greater length in William Jowett’s Christian Researches in the Mediterranean (1822), 197-204.) But preparing the manuscript for print took the BFBS nearly a quarter of a century: Gospels in 1824, the New Testament in 1828, and the whole Bible in 1844. Platt does not tell anything about the twenty-four-year editing process, but one can easily imagine him wearily looking up to the skies.

Some insight into our Digital Humanities Stream

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by Louis Knölker, Student Research Assistant

As part of our research, one of our goals is to visualize the distribution and development of Bible translations and to make the resulting interactive world map available to researchers on a dedicated website. This will make it easier to analyse such relationships as those between colonial expansion and the global distribution of the Bible. We have sourced a number of books that list various Bible translations. These books provide lots of dates, names, and places associated with the translation of the Bible into about 1400 languages. It would have been conceivable for us to manually enter all the data of interest from our various data sources to the project into a database ourselves. This would have taken a lot of time that we can save with DH tools. Nevertheless, we still have to do a lot of work before the data can be feed into our database. In order to extract this selected data, it is necessary to ensure that the books were in a machine-readable format that can be further processed by the computer. To do this, we needed an optical character recognition tool (OCR). We opted for the open-source program OCR4all from the University of Würzburg. For our process, the following essential steps are required:

  1. Preprocessing
    In this step, each individual page we are interested in is categorized into different sections. This is necessary for a subsequent step of optical character recognition (OCR). In the preprocessing step, for example, a distinction is already made between the year of certain translations and the number of speakers of a particular language. This differentiation of different numbers would hardly be possible for the AI and must therefore be prepared manually.
  2. Text Recognition
    Now the first automated text recognition takes place, as is also known from programs such as Adobe Acrobat or similar. However, this first run is based on a very general model that is not yet tailored to the specifics of the book. Accordingly, there are still many errors, such as the confusion of O and 0. In this state, the data cannot be used for our purposes.
  3. Correction of the automated text recognition
    Any incorrect results from step 2 must now be corrected manually. However, this does not involve correcting the entire corpus that we created, rather only a fraction. These must be meticulously checked to see whether the text recognition matches the original and, if necessary, changes must be made. This quickly reveals typical errors that the program has repeatedly made, such as not recognizing special characters or accents.
  4. Training an adapted text recognition model
    The data resulting from the previous step is now used by the program to create a machine learning model with which the text recognition is tailored to the corpus. This significantly reduces the error rate.
  5. Application of the improved model
    The optimized model is now applied and the text recognition step is repeated.
  6. Correcting the result again
    Once again, a limited number of pages are corrected manually, thereby increasing the data set for further improvement of the AI model.
  7. Repeat steps 3-6 until the text recognition has been optimized
  8. Finalization

Theoretically, this should be the process. Unfortunately, not everything always works as intended and so we also encountered problems that we had to deal with. Unfortunately, step 4 only worked once and since then we have had problems with the program. Therefore, we had to correct many of the passages of the book that were relevant to our regional focus (Arctic, Australia and Oceania, West Africa) completely by hand.

1. Compiling a list of the relevant regional languages

Using a keyword search, I compiled a list of a few hundred languages from the regions mentioned.

2. Linking with the Glottolog

These languages were also linked to their respective data in the Glottolog, an open-access website that lists all the world’s languages and links them to identification codes, among other things. The linking of language and the so-called glottocode will facilitate future research and was planned for the final map. The difficulty in this step lies in the names of the languages. Languages often have different names, which may differ from our base sources and in the “Glottolog” database. Some names are also outdated or may only include one dialect today, meaning that they are no longer considered independent languages.

3. Manual correction of the respective sections

Correcting the individual pages is a relatively time-consuming process in which you always have to compare the original lines with the generated ones. As a result, you have to read every line of the corpus twice. This limits the reading pleasure, as does the often keyword-like text structure, so that you have to make a concerted effort to concentrate.

Nevertheless, there are always exciting passages and amazing anecdotes in our sources. I was often impressed by the great personal commitment of people who often translated the Bible into languages that only had a few hundred speakers. I would like to briefly present one of the best and extreme stories here, namely the story of the Bible translation into the Auca language:

Auca is one such micro-language with just 300 speakers, the Warani, who live in the Ecuadorian jungle. As early as the 17th century, there was peaceful contact between the Warani and a Jesuit priest who lived among them for several years. However, his successor was murdered and contact with the tribe was broken off. It was not until around 300 years later, in 1956, that there was another attempt to Christianize the Warani. A group of five missionaries led by Nathaniel Saint set out to convert the Warani, but all five members of the company were also murdered. Amazingly, this terrible event motivated Rachel Saint, Nathaniel Saint’s sister, and Betty Elliott, widow of one of the murdered missionaries, to try again – this time successfully. Thanks to the great efforts of these women, the entire tribe was evangelized ten years later and the Gospel of Mark was translated. In 1965, the children of the deceased Nathaniel Saint were baptized in the Curaray River at the site of their father’s murder. The baptism was performed by one of the men involved in the murder of their father.

From: Nida, Eugene A. (ed.) Book of a Thousand Tongues. 2nd ed., United Bible Societies, 1972, p. 69.

Blubber for Bibles

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The Global Bible project is focussing on three case study regions: the Arctic, Australia and Oceania and West Africa. This blog relates to missions to the Inuit people of the Arctic. After the defeat of the United Kingdom of Denmark Norway in the Napoleonic wars, the British and Foreign Bible Society was more actively involved in supporting and publishing translations into the Inuit languages of Greenland and British North America.  

In 1821, English readers were encouraged by remarkable news from the Moravian missions in Labrador. In their ‘Monthly Extracts’, the Bible Society reported that the Moravian missionaries in Okkak, Labrador, August 8, 1821, thanked the Society for the ‘valuable present of more copies of the New Testament in the Esquimaux language’ (Latrobe 1821).  From Nain, there was a report of an even more practical and enthusiastic reception. Brother Benjamin Kohlmeister (1756-1844), wrote that ‘several of our Esquimaux’ had decided ‘of their own accord’ to make a collection of seal blubber for the Society (Kohlmeister 1821: 103). Some brought whole seals, others smaller sections in the name of their children. Having received their own version of the Bible, they now wished to see the work continued for peoples elsewhere. 

They begged me to send this collection of blubber (yielding 30 gallons of oil) to those generous friends who printed the Bibles for them, that more heathen might be presented with that book ‘so precious above all things.’  

Kohlmeister’s letter was soon copied by other evangelical journals (Christian Observer 1821: 787) as a particularly pleasing response to the British and Foreign Bible Society which had funded and shipped the ‘Esquimaux Bible’ to the Moravian missions in North America. 

At one level, the Moravian report is a strong indication of the agency of the new Moravian Christians in Newfoundland. It also reflected the ethos of the Bible Society, which discouraged the gratuitous distribution of Bibles, even among the very poor, in favour of a subscription. In England, a local committee (Dudley 1821: 412) reported, ‘The readiness of the poor to make their periodical payments is most gratifying.’ The Bible was a privilege to be earned, not imposed or given away without recognition of its cost. 

The Global Bible project is examining how the extension of these principles impacts on the translation of the Bible among non-literate peoples in areas of expanding European colonisation. For the Inuit people of Greenland, this meant encounters mediated through missionaries from German lands, especially Lutherans and Moravians. Moravians were also active in British North America and in Newfoundland they secured more or less exclusive access to trade and proselytise the local people. As traders, the Moravians were the catalyst for dramatic changers in the economy of the Inuit peoples of the North.  

Blubber was the medium of exchange, not just for Bibles but for the whole exchange economy.  

As Brice Bennett (1990), the Moravians were traders and closely implicated in the commercialization of the arctic frontier. The Moravians created mission stations with an attached trade store, which allowed for the exchange of European items including weapons (though not initially), ironware, tobacco and other goods which were exchanged for seal oil, furs and Inuit artefacts, including carvings. For the Greenlanders, the principal tradable commodity was rendered fat from sea mammals, a product which had never formed part of the traditional economy. 

For the Global Bible project, it is important to place the effort to translate the bible into the wider colonial context. While the new bible translations were undoubtedly received with enthusiasm, there were also hidden costs.  

Research on this case study is ongoing and we are particularly interested in the way in which missionaries from German lands collaborated with British missionary and Bible societies beyond national and international boundaries. 

References 

Brice-Bennett, Carol. 1990. ‘Missionaries as Traders: Moravians and Labrador Inuit, 1771-1860’. In Merchant-Credit and Labour Strategies in Historical Perspective, ed. Rosemary E. Ommer (Fredericton, NB: Acadiensis Press). 

Dudley, C.S. 1821. An Analysis of the System of the Bible Society (London: Watts). Google Books 

Kohlmeister 1821. ‘Extract of a Letter from Brother Kohlmeister’. Periodical Accounts Relating to the Missions of the Church of the United Brethren 8: 103-4.  Memorial University of Newfoundland DAI 

Latrobe, Rev. C.J. 1821, ‘Labrador and Greenland’, Monthly Extracts from the Correspondence of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 17.52: 68-71 

The 1940 BFBS Conference on African Languages

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On 28 May 1940, a group of 33 people met at the British and Foreign Bible Society headquarters (‘Bible House’) in London for a conference on African languages. The evacuation at Dunkirk was under way; the sea was full of U-boats; on the morning of the conference, the news arrived of the Belgian capitulation. What better moment to discuss the state of Biblical translation on the African continent? The conference report contrasted the shared sentiment that “lights were going out one by one in Europe” with the “unquenchable optimism” of those present, “a band of men moving towards the sunlight”; the opening speaker called to mind that the BFBS had also been founded at a time when Napoleon was plotting his invasion of England.

The African Languages conference at Bible House, 29 May 1940

The occasion for the conference was to discuss a series of reports by the BFBS secretary for Africa, W.J. Wiseman, and the outcomes of a questionnaire sent out to missionaries and missionary societies (all in BFBS archives, Cambridge University Library: GBR/0374/BFBS/BSA/F2/9/8, marked as ‘confidential’; no outcomes of the conference seem to have been published). Between 1937 and 1939, Wiseman had made two large inspection tours along missionary stations and Bible colporteurs in sub-Saharan Africa and on the larger islands, covering more than 40,000 miles by plane, boat, lorry, and any other means of transport. The purpose of this was to survey the efficacy of Bible translations. While the BFBS mission was to make the Bible available to all people in their own language, in practice the cost and difficulties associated with producing a full translation – printed and shipped from Britain – were proportionally larger for smaller languages, and the reliability of the translations hard to ascertain except in situ. Meanwhile cheap Bibles were being mass-produced in European languages; Wiseman quotes customer complaints that “The price of a small French New Testament in Douala was 2 francs, while a New Testament in the local language (in the same bookshop) was priced 10 francs. The African cannot understand why prices to Europeans are so much lower. We point out that the books are smaller; then he, too, wants a smaller book.”

Questionnaires and Language Engineering

The question with which Wiseman was travelling the continent, then, was not only which languages still did not have a Bible translation and which translations needed revision, but also which language communities could be served more easily through a cognate language, a larger (trade) language such as Hausa or Swahili, or even the colonizer’s language. How to demarcate a ‘language’ within a language continuum or dialect cluster was more than a theoretical issue here: apart from the money and effort involved, translation also implied creating a standard written language and thereby cementing or reshuffling linguistic hierarchies. About Lingala, for instance, Wiseman reported that “We are told that the language is being stabilised along the line of the New Testament speech”. To get this picture clearer, and expressly to avoid wasted effort, the questionnaire that the BFBS sent out requested missionaries to indicate

The BFBS questionnaire as filled in by Rev. Taylor

  1. The language of your district.
  2. Boundaries of the language area.
  3. (a) Number who speak the language.
    (b) Number of Christians.
  4. What progress has been made since 1930
    (a) in the number of Christians?
    (b) in the literacy of the tribe?
  5. Is the language known to other tribes?
  6. What relation does it bear to other tongues?
    Which is the principal language?

…as well as the state of extant translations, work in progress, and further translation work needed. Most tellingly, and somewhat chillingly, the last question was about the viability of the language:

  1. Is (a) a European language, (b) a trade language, (c) another principal language, likely to supplant that of your tribe?

As questionnaires go, the response was uneven; the most detailed information was provided by the Conseil Protestant du Congo Belge, from whom Wiseman desired ‘a wide statesmanlike view of the whole Congo field’ notwithstanding the fact that the Protestant mission in Congo was seriously outnumbered in the field by its Catholic rivals. More modestly, the Conseil’s secretary offered a criticism of the state-sponsored overview of Les Peuplades du Congo Belge (1937), which was “based on very incomplete data” and “not reliable in details. Furthermore, no map can indicate accurately the overlapping of tribes which is almost universal” – a picture further complicated by “the penetration of trade-languages and government languages”. Echoing Wiseman’s concerns, the Conseil Protestant’s secretary stressed the ‘tragic wastefulness’ of some translation efforts in the past:

There was no means to estimate the potential usefulness of a language. Wherever a gifted and energetic linguist happened to settle, a translation was made. The tragic wastefulness of this is evident to-day in the versions used by limited and declining numbers of people, often bea[u]tiful and scholarly versions, such as the Bobangi Bible, the Inkongo Bible [and] the Luba-Sanga Bible; and in the multiple versions which have divided people instead of uniting them, as in the case of Kikongo, Ngala, Lunda, and the many varieties of Luba.

The 1940 BFBS conference brings to mind a similar conference that had been hosted at the Prussian embassy in London eighty-six years earlier, the so-called ‘Alphabetic Conference’ convened by Baron Bunsen and the CMS Secretary, John Venn. There, the discussion had been about a uniform system of phonetic transcription for non-European languages, to be used by missionaries and philologists alike; along with an unlikely list of leading scholars from different fields, all the main Protestant missionary societies had been represented. If the 1854 conference had sought to establish a framework for standardized Bible translation, the 1940 conference was taking stock. Enquiries were made by Wiseman into 59 African languages; appended to his reports was a longer list of 204 languages, with ticks to indicate if that language possessed ‘Bibles’, ‘Testaments’ (generally the New), or ‘Portions’. On the carbon copy, where the column ‘Bible’ was empty, Wiseman indicated in red ink what other languages could fill the gaps. Most listed were Hausa, Swahili, Kikongo, English, and Portuguese.

Wiseman’s list of languages and translations, with annotations in red ink

What Wiseman was delivering at the BFBS conference, then, was effectively both an ethnolinguistic survey and a business report. Though Wiseman never intended his work as a contribution to linguistic scholarship, and did not delve into linguistic details, he may well have been at more places in Africa to gather information about languages in the area where they were spoken than any Africanist. More technical linguistic information must have been provided at the conference by Ida Ward, at that point Head of the Department of African Studies at SOAS, who is listed as a speaker about “Bible translations and new orthographies”. She had been involved in the making of the Africa Alphabet, a version of the Latin alphabet supplemented with IPA characters. Whether or not to adopt it was a major issue for the BFBS, although the resolution passed about orthography was functionally vague (“a modern orthography, where possible acceptable to the Government of the country, and based upon the principles recognized by the Bible Society and by all the missions concerned”).

 

Bible Industry

The local detail in Wiseman’s reports, rather, is about the commercial realities of selling Bibles in the colonies. In Northern Nigeria, the use of box tricycles enabled the colporteurs to cover greater distances in less time; and as “the methods adopted will create a desire for literacy, the Government is showing interest in this effort”. One colporteur targeting Indians in East Africa was taken to task because “he is apparently mainly occupied in evangelical work. The Secretary impressed upon the friends responsible for this work at Nairobi that the Bible Society’s grant is to be taken for selling the scriptures among Indians.” A more industrious colporteur in Kenya, however, was applauded for creatively piecing together his own means of transport and thereby saving the Society the cost of buying and running a truck:

The Rev. J.G. Stephenson has built a large comfortable motor colportage caravan, with special back-door shelves opening in the form of a bookstall and with ample accommodation for carrying stocks of books. A large photograph of this caravan can be seen in the Secretary’s office at the Bible House. Mr. Stephenson is prepared to undertake four-monthly winter tours, November to February, the best season of the year for such operations, wholly in the interest of the Bible Society. […] The total expense to the Bible Society for such a tour of four months is about £ 125. This is enormously less in cost than any scheme hitherto submitted. The Secretary has seen the man and the van and unreservedly recommends that the Committee should undertake a trial for these four months of the Winter season.

Unfortunately no photograph of Stephenson’s ingenious vehicle has been kept in the archive folder, but a resolution was passed (to general cheer, one imagines) to grant him the £ 125.

In his reports on Bible sales, Wiseman comes across more as a travelling sales agent than as a missionary, making a cool-headed assessment of profits and losses. Here the image of tinkering in local conditions stands in stark contrast to the industrial scale of operations, with 1,200 colporteurs active and sales of up to 56,415 Bibles (in Madagascar) yearly. To allay any fears that “Christian organisations are not alert and businesslike”, Wiseman provided reassurance that the Bible was an unbeatable best-seller and the BFBS outperformed all competitors, even if sales across West Africa had gone down in recent years because a slump in the cacao industry had left people destitute. Still, the very fact that the otherwise parsimonious BFBS spent a considerable sum on Wiseman’s two six-month inspection tours is a sign that selling the Word was by no means easy business, and his reports repeatedly emphasized how language variety – among other factors – was a liability:

For various reasons Africa is not yet so feasible a proposition for colportage as India and China. The peoples of the Orient live in huge centres of population and tens of millions can be reached in one language alone. In parts of Africa languages change in every fifty miles, money is very rarely needed and therefore seldom available, also, worst of all, often more than ninety percent of the people are wholly illiterate.

But contrary to that grim assessment, he stated on the same page that “more Bibles are sold in [Equatorial] Africa alone than in the whole of India and China by all Bible Societies combined”; in West Africa mission bookshops avowedly held an almost complete monopoly over the stationery and book trade. The result of this Bible industry was nothing less than a cultural transformation on a continental scale. Since the late 2010s, Africa is the continent with the largest Christian population, whereas Christianity has remained a minority religion in India and China.

Wiseman’s reports and the general tone of the conference were inevitably paternalistic. Interest in African cultures and traditions was nil, unless where it affected sales; Africa was the ‘Dark Continent’, converts were viewed as a flock, and local salesmen described as lazy and unreliable (except for one Colporteur Sododo, “a clean, neat, alert and happy-looking man” and former tailor who was making phenomenal sales on the Gold Coast). But if the BFBS imagined the future largely in terms of a mission civilisatrice, that future also included African leadership. A clear power shift occurred in the Kingwana (Congolese Copperbelt Swahili) version, where the voice of native translators was given primacy – as the head of the Stanleyville mission reported, in the full awareness of the impact of its language engineering:

We had a splendid Language Conference, with about forty present, mostly evangelists. We had before them the pure SWAHILI of Zanzibar and copies of the versions from Stanleyville and Ruwenzori and our old style and the new mss I was working upon. At the request of the natives, we whites left and they continued the discussion themselves.
In the afternoon we met together. They had decided that we as a Mission ought to take up the Stanleyville dialect known as the LUABALA KINGWANA. Because it is so different from our old style of speaking, the change-over will be a tremendous task, involving all our printed matter – Hymnbooks, Primers, Readers, etc. – and to change the spelling as well as the grammatical construction will amount to almost learning a new language. But it will be worth while. It is ‘a disturbing of the present to establish the future’. All agreed that it is much fuller in expression and vocabulary.