REL 253-4 : Foundations of Mission

The format of the new The Bible in the 21st Century series reflects an international dialogue between experts and graduate students. In this book, experts on Bible translations present essays on the practices of translating the Bible for the present and the future, through Christian and Jewish approaches, in Western Europe and North America as well as in the former Eastern Bloc and in Africa.

Brunn has been involved in Bible translation work around the world for many years. By giving us a better understanding of the process of translation, Brunn helps us read and understand Scripture more clearly. He demonstrates how the variety of translations enables us to grasp more fully the meaning of the biblical text.

Thuesen shows in this fascinating history, the revision movement in fact resulted in a vast proliferation of English scripture editions and an enduring polarization of American Christians over versions of holy writ. This proliferation of translations, he argues, shows something important about contemporary attitudes toward scripture. Although the Bible is regarded as immutable, conservatives and liberals alike now believe the text must evolve to fit the needs of each era.

These essays, by means of critical engagement with the translation, translation practices, and translation history of texts relevant to the study of Bible and ancient and modern Christianity, explore theoretical dimensions and contemporary implications of translations and translation practice.

This ambitious and ground-breaking book examines the linguistic studies produced by missionaries based on the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America (and particularly Haida Gwaii) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Making extensive use of unpublished archival materials, the author demonstrates that the missionaries were responsible for introducing many innovative and insightful grammatical analyses. Rather than merely adopting Graeco-Roman models, they drew extensively upon studies of non-European languages, and a careful exploration of their scripture translations reveal the origins of the Haida sociolect that emerged as a result of the missionary activity. The complex interactions between the missionaries and anthropologists are also discussed, and it is shown that the former sometimes anticipated linguistic analyses that are now incorrectly attributed to the latter. Since this book draws upon recent work in theoretical linguistics, religious history, translation studies, and anthropology, it emphasises the unavoidably interdisciplinary nature of Missionary Linguistics research. As of January 2019, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.