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.
The nineteenth century has been called the century of bible societies (Risch quoted by Gundert, p. 34). In German-speaking lands alone, some 500 bible societies were established in the nineteenth century. In contrast, in the eighteenth century, there was only one bible society established in German lands, the Canstein Bible Society (Cansteinsche Bibelanstalt) (Heidenreich 2024). What then led to the proliferation of bible societies in the nineteenth century?
Figure 1: Establishment of German Bible Societies in nineteenth century (number per year). Data from Gundert 1987.
One major external influence in the establishment of German bible societies came from the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS), established in London in 1804. At the establishment of the BFBS a circular was sent out to influential Christians, both theologians and laypeople, in Europe to inform them of the new society, and to encourage them to establish their own bible societies. The BFBS also supplied funds to encourage and support the establishment of bible societies. Thus, already in 1804 the German Bible Society was established through a cooperation of two Bible Societies in German-speaking Basel (Switzerland) and Nuremberg (Franconia). Both of these locations were in the south, meaning that they were not in direct competition with the Canstein Bible Society in the north. Initially, the main seat of the German Bible Society was Nuremberg, however, that changed soon after as the printing was transferred to Basel. In the aftermath of the French invasion of Switzerland, the Basel Bible Society catered to a Swiss audience by publishing French-language bibles for Protestants, who had been affected by the violence. The focus on internal Swiss needs meant that the German-language need for bibles was not adequately covered to the disappointment of many. This desire for bibles was in part a reflection of the pietist movement of the early eighteenth century that placed a focus on bible reading as well as the activities of lay people within religious communities. Moreover, the general desire for education inspired a Christian feeling of responsibility towards the poor and the growth of German religious societies. Thus, when the BFBS was established in 1804 the internal influences on religious people in German lands were such that the BFBS model was easy to replicate. However, before a reorganisation of the German Bible Society could be occur, continental Europe was at war.
1812-1830
With the Napoleonic Wars and the Continental Blockade (Blocus continental) from the end of 1806 to April 1814, communications between England and the continent mostly ceased. In those years, only a few bible societies were established. In 1812, Carl Friedrich Adolf Steinkopf (1773-1849), who was a German theologian and former secretary of the Christian Society (Deutsche Christentumsgesellschaft) in Basel, was able to travel back to continental Europe via Sweden. He was pastor of the Lutheran Church of the Savoy, London, which was the second oldest German-speaking church in Great Britain, being founded in 1694.Steinkopf was also a member of the BFBS as well as other religious societies. On the continent, he visited many of his former contacts in religious circles and persuaded many to establish bible societies, with the financial support of the BFBS and following the model of the BFBS system.
When Napoleon was defeated and the blockage was raised, four men from the BFBS travelled to continental Europe to help establish Bible societies. John Patterson, Robert Pinkerton, Dr. Christian Schwabe (minister of the German Lutheran Church, Goodman’s Fields, London) and Ebenezer Henderson were very effective, with 25 bible societies established in the German states in 1814 alone. The method was to provide funds for the establishment of a bible society firstly in the large cities, then subsequently focusing on the smaller cities. The bible societies were to be ecumenical—some even included Catholics—and were encouraged to be independent societies, rather than assuming subsidiary positions with the BFBS network. Nevertheless, the BFBS was seen by many German bible societies in the early nineteenth centruy as the ‘mother’ society.
There was a perceived need for affordable bibles in the German Confederation, as years of war and blockade had left people without access to the Bible. Added to this was an increased interest in reading the Bible, which had been encouraged by the establishment of a number of religious societies in the early nineteenth century. Despite such interest, the supply of Bibles was quite restricted. The seven larger Bible societies (Canstein, Prussian, Württemberg, Saxon, Bavarian, Schleswig-Holstein and Strassburg) usually printed or had printed their own bibles, while the smaller societies obtained their bibles from these seven or other printers. Initially, bible societies gave away up to a third of all bibles free of charge, as in the case of the Württemberg Bible Society, but by the end of the century this figure had fallen considerably, so that the vast majority of Bibles were purchased (Gundert 1987, p. 172).
In the seven years between 1814-1820, 185 new bible societies were established in the German Confederation. The majority of these bible societies saw themselves as stemming from the BFBS. Unlike the BFBS, however, the German bible societies did not initially see their role as sponsors of foreign language translations of the bible, rather as publishes of languages of the people in their own jurisdictions. This included not only Standard High German (Hochdeutsch), but languages such Polish and Sorbian. The connections to the BFBS were strained and in many cases completely ruptured when in August 1822 the BFBS declared that they would not support the publication of any bibles which included the Apocrypha, that is, the non-canonical writings placed by Luther between the Old and New Testament. Almost all of the German, Swiss, Scandinavian and French bible societies were not prepared to follow this directive and continued to print bibles with the Apocrypha, although without financial support from the BFBS. A few German societies, including those connected to the Moravian Church, agreed to the new conditions. In 1827, the BFBS committee allowed for the New Testament, or the New Testament with Psalms, to be distributed to the bible societies for free, and many German societies took advantage of these publications. However, the majority of German bible societies wished to continue circulating bibles with the Apocrypha and thus relationships with the BFBS were tempered. This resulted in the BFBS establishing around 1830 their own branch and storehouse in Frankfurt from where continental Europe could be supplied with bibles. Such developments ensured that the German bible societies became independent of the BFBS.
The time of more independence
In the period between 1830 and 1848, the year of the March Revolution, over 100 further German bible societies were established. The remit of the German bible societies was predominantly the inner mission, and at times German emigrants in places such North America. The first half of the nineteenth century was also a period in which German foreign Christian missions were beginning to be established. The Danish-Halle-English mission in Tranquebar (Tharangambadi, Tamil Nadu, India) had already been established in the early eighteenth century, followed by Moravian missions from the 1730s. The early nineteenth century would see further German Protestant mission societies be established, such as the Basel mission in 1815, the Goßner mission in 1831 or the Rhenish mission from 1828. A consequence of the increased number of mission societies was that bible societies lost some of their donors, as the former were seen to confront more pressing issues in the conversion of non-Christians than were the Bible societies in their wish to spread Christianity amongst the poor. Mission societies were strongly connected with the translation of the bible into local languages. Yet when it came to the “reduction” of oral languages to written form, German missionaries and missionary societies often relied on funds from the BFBS for the publication of bibles in indigenous languages as German bible societies did not see this as their main task. By the end of the century, when Germany had its own colonies, the fact that German bible societies rarely published foreign language bibles was seen by some religious commentators of the period to be an indication of a lack of German patriotism (Richter 1899, p. 11). A few mother-tongue bibles had been published, for example the Basel Bible Society (Basler Bibelgesellschaft) funded the publishing of the Basel Talu New Testament (China-Tibet) as well as the Ga Bible, and the Württemburg Bible Society (Württemburgische Bibelgesellschaft) supported the publishing of the Duala New Testamen, with the Bremen Bible Society supporting the publication of the Ewe Bible. But there was a belief from some people that German bible societies should do more for German missions, and thus for German colonialism. However, given that from the mid-nineteenth century German mission societies received significantly more public funding than German bible societies, there was also the pressing issue of prioritising bible versions given the limited availability of funding.
Women’s work
Missing from the current blog are female voices. Much of the material used for this blog is taken from the work of Wilhelm Gundert, who wrote the history of the German bible societies in the nineteenth century. Gundert’s work is one of a grand narrative and named men with there being little information on women’s work, or the contributions of non-Europeans to the translation, printing and dissemination of bibles. Partly Gundert explains these omissions due to lack of sources. There were, he states, a number of lady’s bible associations in Germany in the nineteenth century, however, there is scarcely any archival material pertaining to them (Gundert 1987, p. 233). This is in contrast, for example, to the work of British women. According to contemporary reports, there were more than 100 women selling Bibles in London in the early 1860s (Auxiliary Bible Society of New South Wales 1861, p. 5). British scholarship has examined the role of women noting their importance for work of the BFBS (Martin 2004; Lane 2004). Compared to their British counterparts, German women were slower to obtain the franchise, or to be able to earn their own living. Their contributions to public life are also not as often reported on as in Britain. Furthermore, women’s societies and associations often had numerous functions, for example the Female Association for the Poor and Invalids (Weiblichen Verein für Armen- und Krankenpflege) in Hamburg also disseminated bibles, without the word mentioned in their title (Gundert 1987, p. 235). Unlike mission societies, where females working in foreign countries reported on their work to European audiences, thus gaining female supporters (Habermas 2017, p. 507), there were no female role models in the German bible societies. Just because nineteenth century printed sources scarcely mention female actors, this does not mean that they were not working behind the scenes to support bible societies through donations, or through selling bibles. Yet their voices are harder to find in the dominant narratives of the history of bible societies, and thus provide a strong motivation to increase focus on them in our further research.
Sources:
Auxiliary Bible Society of New South Wales, 1861. Empire (Sydney), Tuesday 12 February, p. 5
Gundert, Wilhelm. 1987. Geschichte der deutschen Bibelgesellschaften im 19. Jahrhundert. Bielefeld: Luther-Verlag.
Gundert, Wilhelm. 1987. Festschrift zur Gründung der Privilegierten Württembergischen Bibelanstalt vor 175 Jahren. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft
Habermas, Rebekka. 2017. “Colonies in the Countryside: Doing Mission in Imperial Germany.” Journal of Social History 50, no. 3 (2017): 502–17. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45133237.
Heidenreich, Sven. 2024. “The Cansteinsche Bibelanstalt: The oldest German Bible Society.” In Global Bible: British and German Bible Societies Translating Colonialism, 1800-1914, Blog post. https://globalbible.blogs.bristol.ac.uk/2024/04/19/the-cansteinsche-bibelanstalt-the-oldest-german-bible-society/ (Accessed 11 June 2024)Lane, Sarah. 2004 “Forgotten Labours: Women’s Bible Work and the BFBS.” In Stephen Batalden, Kathleen Cann and John Dean (eds). Sowing the Seed. The Cultural Impact of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1804-2004 (Phoenix Press: Sheffield), 53-62.
Martin, Roger. 2004. “Women and the Bible Society”, In Stephen Batalden, Kathleen Cann and John Dean (eds). Sowing the Seed. The Cultural Impact of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1804-2004 (Phoenix Press: Sheffield), 38-52
Richter, Paul. 1899. “Was haben die Bibelgesellschaften für die Mission geleistet?.” Allgemeine Missions-Zeitschrift 26: 11-31.
Linguistic fieldwork in the Indonesian archipelago, throughout the 19th century, was largely the province of the Dutch Bible Society (NBG). Two Bible translators stand out for their contributions to linguistic scholarship: J.F.C. Gericke on Javanese in the late 1820s-1850s, and Herman Neubronner van der Tuuk on Toba Batak, Malay, Lampung, Balinese, and various other languages in the second half of the century. Their methods were as similar as their personalities were different. Gericke was pious, deferential, a bit naïve, and well liked by the colonial and Javanese elites; Van der Tuuk was an inveterate polemicist and open atheist who went half native, and whose eccentricities and vituperative letters earned him something of a legendary status.
Both figure prominently in J.L. Swellengrebel’s history of the NBG in Indonesia, In Leijdeckers Voetspoor (2 vols., 1974-78); but while little has been written about Gericke since, Van der Tuuk’s correspondence as preserved in the NBG archives has been edited not once but twice. The titles of both collections are telling: Rob Nieuwenhuis’ pocket volume of letters selected for their historical or literary merit is called De Pen in Gal Gedoopt (the pen dipped in bile, 1962/82), while Kees Groeneboer’s near-exhaustive annotated edition bears the title Een Vorst onder de Taalgeleerden (a king among linguists, 2002). Annoyingly enough, the sole passages that Groeneboer sometimes intentionally omits are about linguistic details.
The two editions of Van der Tuuk’s correspondence, 1962/82 and 2002
What both Gericke and Van der Tuuk (as well as other NBG translators) did was set up a philological cottage industry with up to half a dozen local staff. Together with their writers and language teachers (guru bahasa), they collected and edited Indonesian manuscripts, compiled a grammar and a dictionary of the target language before setting to translation work. In Gericke’s case, the preparatory work also included setting up a short-lived Javanese language institute at Surakarta (1832-42) modelled on Fort William College; Van der Tuuk devoted part of his energies to the revision of the main Dutch-Malay dictionary. On their deaths they left two of the richest collections of Indonesian manuscripts, now in Leiden University Library. But is particularly through their periodical, lengthy letters to the NBG that their work can be followed. In effect, these are among the most detailed (and in Gericke’s case, the first) linguistic fieldwork reports from the 19th century.
A Patchwork of Languages (and Religions)
The colonial language dynamics within which the NBG operated was quite complicated. Colonial Indonesia (or the ‘Dutch East Indies’) was a patchwork of hundreds of languages, of which a dozen had their own writing systems. Malay was the lingua franca of the archipelago, of which the high literary register, written in adapted Arabic Javi script, differed quite strongly from the trade language and local varieties. Javanese was the largest language in terms of native speakers, with a literary tradition going back to the 9th or 10th century CE; at the core of that tradition was a corpus in Old Javanese (Kawi, ‘poet’, from Sanskrit kāvya) largely derived from Hindu epics and enacted at wayang shadow puppet plays. The Kawi corpus and language, however, had been preserved better on Bali, which had remained (and still is) largely Hindu while most of Java had converted to Islam. Batak, on which Van der Tuuk worked, was a language cluster on Central Sumatra of which most speakers adhered to Indigenous religious traditions. These were only some of the larger languages within the sphere of Dutch colonial and missionary activities; by 1936, the NBG proclaimed to have translated the Bible into 33 languages.
Language map of Indonesia showing the language area of NBG translations, 1936
That linguistic patchwork also clearly reflected religious rivalries and religious syncretism. All the Indonesian writing systems, like those of Southern India, derived from Brahmi, and had developed together with the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism. Malay, on the other hand, was strongly linked to the spread of Islam, still ongoing in the 19th century, and the preponderance of Malay is the main reason why Dutch, though officially the language of colonial administration, did not become a ‘world language’ like French or Spanish. But Indonesian and especially Javanese Islam was thoroughly syncretic, with Sufi, Hindu, and Buddhist elements. When Gericke arrived in Surakarta to translate the Bible into Javanese, the Java War (1825-30) was still raging, in which Dutch colonial rule was challenged by the charismatic prince Diponegoro, who styled himself as both a traditional wayang hero and a sufi seer. In an early letter, Gericke recounts a visit to a “Javanese Seminary [pesantrèn ≈ madrassa] for the formation of priests” from which a lot of Diponegoro’s following had been recruited (as well as, presumably, Gericke’s own language teachers):
The number of students before the war was nearly 3000; now there are barely 200. The Emperor of Surakarta has bequeathed 31 dessas (villages) to it for its maintenance. Teaching consists mainly of learning to read the Qu’ran and memorizing the five daily prayers. Moreover students are educated in the secrets of the Buddhists and Betoros [Hindu deities], which have been preserved by the priests either through tradition or in their books after the conversion of the Javanese to Islam.
The letter is telling in a number of ways, not only about religious syncretism and religious politics but also about Gericke’s own attitudes. Though loyal to the Dutch authorities – he argued that “nothing can be achieved without them” – he became increasingly critical of their offhand treatment of the Javanese, and gained a lot of prestige by getting the head of the pesantrèn out of prison. After that, he visited the ruins of the Buddhist temple complex Borobudur, speculated about Buddhism as a purely philosophical religion, and dreamed of a journey to Bali to learn proper Kawi. He stands in stark contrast to his predecessor/rival as a translator, the Baptist missionary Gottlob Brückner, whose entire edition of the New Testament in Javanese, printed at Serampore, was seized by the Dutch authorities because he was also distributing anti-Islamic tracts right after the end of the Java War.
Van der Tuuk’s attitudes were a lot more antagonistic than Gericke’s. He regarded Bible translation as a hopeless task because each language was so deeply ingrained with a specific – religious – worldview that any translation would go either against the spirit of the language or of Christianity. Yet while he loathed the task, the one positive role he saw for Christianity was as an antidote to Islam, which he loathed even more and which was rapidly making inroads in the Batak lands. (Nowadays, Batak religiosity is roughly 55% Christian / 45% Islam.) Nor did he have many kind words to spare for Chinese traders, Javanese servants, Lampung peasants, the local nobility, Dutch missionaries, or the Gouvernement. Ironically, after an early incident in which he tendered his leave in a heavy fit of tropical fever, his relations with the NBG remained quite good throughout, although they knew full well that he was not a ‘theologizer’: they tolerated his eccentricities and heterodoxies because of his unmistakable merits as a linguist. When he finally left the NBG for a much-better paid position in the civil service in 1873, his last letter to them a month later already expressed regrets because his new employers were much more narrow-minded and less respectful of his intellectual independence.
Van der Tuuk’s cottage industry was also decidedly more messy. While Gericke mainly interacted with Javanese clergy and nobility and worked in the proximity of the court of Surakarta, Van der Tuuk decided quickly that Batak as spoken in the district capital was too ‘contaminated’ with Malay and settled in another harbour town, welcoming and paying anyone who could provide him with stories, manuscripts, or instruction in the various Batak dialects. One visitor recounts the scene:
He started by taking a teacher – a Guru – into his house. This man soon became his loyal companion, who ate and drank with him and accompanied him on many walks. Van der Tuuk asserted that, by talking to this Guru in all circumstances, he would soonest find out all the subtleties of the language. And it turned out he was right, for soon he felt able to have long discussions with all kinds of people from the hinterlands. He used the evenings to begin with his grammar; most often he was working until late at night. When I knocked on his door at six to go to the bustling river, he was often very sleepy still. I sometimes wondered at the sight of a half a dozen Batak strangers sound asleep in his parlour.
Van der Tuuk even floated the idea of marrying a Batak girl to learn the language more intimately – itself an indication of how, even while going half native, he still thought from a colonial perspective. He complained about the difficulty of finding good writers and servants in Barus, and two of his Batak teachers left after one of his fits of ire. If Gericke’s relationship with his teachers was much more formal, we also know more about his longtime instructor, Mas Ngabehi Ranuwito, than about any of Van der Tuuk’s associates, whom he hardly ever mentions by name.
The Resurrection of Kawi
Although there had been 17th/18th-century colonial studies of Malay (including various dictionaries and a Bible translation), systematic study of the languages of Indonesia only started with the creation of a central government during the British occupation of Java (1811-16). Kawi, as the most ancient and high-prestige language, played a central role in it: a hundred pages in Vice Governor Stamford Raffles’ History of Java (1817) are devoted to Javanese literature and a translation/synopsis/ commentary of the Brata Yudha (the 12th-century Kawi adaptation of a section of the Mahabharata), based on manuscripts plundered from the kraton (palace) of Yogyakarta and made with the aid of two Javanese nobles. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s posthumous magnum opus on Malayo-Polynesian languages, Über die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Java (1836-39), used this material as the footstone for a historical-comparative grammar, often approvingly citing Gericke’s Javanese primer and grammar. The same is true for the equally massive, unpublished Kawi-Javanese dictionary by his secretary, Eduard Buschmann.
This philologization – also of living languages like Malay and Javanese, in which Raffles and his deputy John Crawfurd collected hundreds of manuscripts – formed the background for Gericke’s and Van der Tuuk’s work on Javanese and Balinese, and especially their dictionaries. What they sought to do was not only to study the lexicon but also to actively purify the language by singling out the Kawi elements. Gericke, who regarded Surakarta Javanese as the uniform standard and other varieties not merely as dialects but as a deformed ‘patois’, sought to cultivate the Kawi element and increase the understanding of it; at the Javanese Institute he hosted fully staged wayang performances. Van der Tuuk, conversely, sought to promote the study and use of Balinese for its own sake, without the pedantic use of half-understood Kawi expressions:
Some Balinese, especially the learned, despise Balinese literature, saying of this or that Balinese writ anjar (it’s new), which means as much as not worth reading. This is also why one searches in vain for useful Balinese texts, because all that is written is full of Kawi words, some of which rendered opaque by excess display of learning. The commentaries to Kawi poems cannot be understood by anyone who does not practice Kawi, for the desire to look learned makes the interpreter use words which are even harder to understand than those they are meant to explain. Here Byron’s quip applies: I wish he had explained his explanation.
A complicating factor for Gericke, especially in Bible translation, was that the main division in Javanese (and in Balinese) is not between ‘elite’ and ‘common’ sociolects but between a ‘top-down’ register used towards people junior in age or rank (ngoko), and a more ornate and periphrastic ‘bottom-up’ register used to address superiors and elders (kromo). This prevades every aspect of the language, with parallel words for nearly everything. Gericke set out to translate the Bible in kromo which was more humble and dignified but changed his mind at a late stage in the translation process because ngoko was more clear and succinct and because the humble register did not convey enough authority. In passages with shifts in speaker perspective, he was dragged into a game of language pingpong:
A small start that I have made with the translations of the Psalms convinces me of the difficulties. […] For example, the second Psalm has seven changes of speaker, which the language must adapt to.
Verse 1 and 2, the Poet speaks Kromo; Verse 3, the enemies of the King upon Zion, as rebels, speak Ngoko; Verse 4 and 5, the Poet again speaks Kromo; Verse 6, God himself speaks Ngoko, differing from that of the rebels; first half of Verse 7, the Anointed speaks Kromo; the other half of the seventh to the end of the ninth verse, containing the words of the Lord to his Anointed One, are Ngoko again; in the final three verses, the Poet speaks Kromo in his admonition to the rebels.
If one sought to use one and the same language in the entire Psalm, no Javanese would understand it. The difference between Kromo and Ngoko is often as big as between Dutch and Polish.
Note that Psalms 2:8 is where God says, in one of the most colonial passages in the Bible, “Ask of Me, and I will give You / The nations for Your inheritance / And the ends of the Earth for Your possession”.
Legacies
Gericke was repatriated in 1857 in what his physician described as “a general state of debility”, and though he seemed to have recovered somewhat back in Europe, he died during a family visit in Düsseldorf towards the end of that year. His Javanese Bible translation, for all its philological merits, did not become the standard translation: it lost out eventually against a more accessible rival version made by the disgruntled missionary Pieter Jansz and published by the BFBS. Van der Tuuk’s Toba Batak Bible also did not establish a lasting standard, because the language changed too much through colonisation and evangelisation. This was as he had predicted, arguing that the Biblical register had to develop in religious practice; accordingly, his work was later revised and used as a matrix by Rhenish missionaries whom he had trained. Van der Tuuk spent his last two decades on Bali, increasingly isolated from Dutch colonial society, working on his four-volume Kawi-Balinese-Dutch dictionary that appeared posthumously. On his death the notary listed among his possessions nearly fl. 140.000 in bonds and assets, the richest manuscript collection in Indonesia, some pots and pans, two donkeys, a dozen chickens, and a hut valued at ten guilders.
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.
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
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.
