Editor’s Note: This article on Congregational Missions is dedicated by Phil Corr to Mr. Will Johnson one of our readers who has expressed his appreciation of Dr. Corr’s articles, especially those involving Hawaii. Read the other articles on Congregational Missions at the link Congregational Missions
“King Kamehameha I had united the islands by force of arms. His successor granted permission to the missionaries to land and carry on their work. They made remarkable progress in their first decade, winning converts in the royal family and among the
chiefs, instituting public services of worship, influencing local legislation in favour of morality, educating thousands of children in schools and defying opposition from foreigners who preferred a lack of moral control – a very different picture to that painted by
novelists.” - J. Edwin Orr on the revival of 1820, Hawaii
(c) 2008 Rev. Phil Corr, Ph. D.
It has been rightly said that the Church is only one generation away from extinction. This usually has to do with the need for each generation to make the Christian faith its own. But it also applies to having the Bible in one’s mother tongue.
Study after study shows that once the Gospel is planted in the hearts of a group of people, they need the Bible translated into their heart language within a generation–or that people group’s church will peter out.
The early Congregational missionaries understood that Bible translation was second in importance only to the verbal proclamation of the Gospel. In chapter five of my dissertation I focus on Bible translation by Congregational missionaries between 1812 and 1840.
Various methods were used to get to the same goal. In India, the missionaries worked closely with indigenous people on the translation. Although the missionaries on Hawaii did interact with Hawaiians about the Bible, faithfulness to the original documents appeared to be more important to those translators.
The missionaries in the Bombay area foreshadowed the principle of Wycliffe Bible Translators in that they stressed the importance of living among the people into whose language they were translating the Bible. They indirectly criticized William Carey for turning out translations without living among the people for whom the Bibles were translated. My view is that it was a both/and. There was a desperate need at that time to translate the Bible into as many languages as possible. As long as others down the road would prepare better translations, by opinion is that a somewhat flawed translation was better than none at all.
Spoken in much of western India and, in various dialects across the continent, Marath is an Indo-Aryan language. Board missionaries Gordan Hall and Samuel Newell decided in 1815 “to prepare a fresh translation” of the Marathi translation, because the previous translation by Carey’s Serampore group was not done by people living in an area where Marathi was the main spoken language.
“No translation into this tongue has hitherto been made, by persons resident among the Mahrattas, and familiarly acquainted with their language; of course, no complete [fully accurate?] translation can have been made in such a context.”
Hall and Newell set forth their reasons for a new translation of the Marathi New Testament: We “hear them speak it and we daily preach in it to the people…. [T]he study and use of this one language is to be the main business of every day of our lives. We think it most obviously our duty to undertake the translation of the Bible.” [emphasis by Hall and Newell] Unlike previous Bible translators of Marathi, Hall and Newell were in the midst of the receptor group and recognized the importance of their location.
The Hawaiian missionaries also lived among the people into whose language they were translating the Bible. As noted above, they apparently did not interact as much when it came to working with the Hawaiians on Bible translation. Also, unlike the missionaries in India, the servants in Hawaii had to create an alphabet from scratch and provide literacy training–much as many Wycliffe Bible translators have to do in our day.
Hiram Bingham–the leading first generation leader of the Congregational missionaries in Hawaii–listed translating the Scriptures as second only to preaching the Gospel as contributing to the fulfillment of the missionaries’ great aim of winning the nation to Christ.
Bingham had oversight of the preparatory and translating work of the Hawaiian Bible. The Hawaiian Mission Children’s Society has on microfilm the work books used by the missionaries in translating the Bible. It is a thrilling project to review evidence of their labor in this area of endeavor.
After completing a revision in 1835 (published in 1836–just two years before the Hawaiian Great Awakening) of the New Testament, the missionaries believed that they could “unhesitatingly recommend the New Testament to the American [Bible] Society as a good translation from the Bible original.”
The ABS, in turn, accepted the 1839 translation of the entire translation in Hawaiian as a “faithful” version of the Holy Scriptures. Bingham wrote of providing Hawaiians with “the living oracles in their own tongue.”
In my next article, I hope to provide more information as to the Bible translating efforts by the early Congregational missionaries.
Phil Corr’s work on the web can be seen at: haystack06.org and fccofcc.com
