Chapter 12: The Bible Goes to the Nations
The age of Bible societies and missionary translation
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought a new movement: Bible translation for every people. In 1715, Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg published the Tamil New Testament at Tranquebar, the first Protestant translation of the New Testament into an Indian language. William Carey and his colleagues at Serampore produced Bible translations in dozens of languages and dialects of South Asia from 1801 onward (Carey’s Bengali New Testament appeared in 1801). Robert Morrison completed the Chinese Bible in 1823, and Adoniram Judson completed the Burmese Bible in 1834 after years of hardship and imprisonment.
The British and Foreign Bible Society was founded in 1804, in part, according to tradition, because a Welsh girl, Mary Jones, had walked many miles to buy a Bible and found none available. Other societies followed, and later the United Bible Societies (1946). Their purpose was to translate, print, and distribute the Scriptures at a price anyone could afford.
The Bible in Africa
In West Africa, Samuel Ajayi Crowther (c. 1809–1891), a Yoruba boy who had been freed from a slave ship, became the first African bishop of the Anglican Church. He translated much of the Bible into Yoruba, Igbo, and other languages, and the complete Yoruba Bible appeared in 1884. In Southern Africa, Robert Moffat completed the Setswana Bible in 1857. In case after case, the translation of the Bible fixed the written form of a language, laid the basis for literacy, schools, and printing, and gave a people dignity in its own tongue (Sanneh 1989).
The twentieth century and today
In 1942, Wycliffe Bible Translators was founded by Cameron Townsend with the aim of translating the Scriptures into every language still without them. Today, translation work by Bible societies, Wycliffe, and many national churches continues. The best current estimates are that the complete Bible is now available in more than seven hundred languages, the New Testament in about seventeen hundred, and at least some portion of Scripture in more than three thousand (United Bible Societies; Wycliffe Global Alliance). These figures change each year, and several thousand languages still await a translation. Digital tools, audio Bibles, and mobile phones are now carrying Scripture to places that printing could not reach.
The pattern continues to match the promise of Revelation 7:9. The Word of God does not belong to one nation, one language, or one culture. It has been translated into more languages than any other book in history.
Summary. The Bible’s spread across the world, at the cost of many lives, is part of the historical evidence of its power. Translation is how the church has obeyed the Great Commission, and the work is not yet finished.