쉐레쉐브스키 주교와 초기 한글성경 : 전도서 1장을 중심으로

Abstract

Born as a Lithuanian Jew and an American immigrant, Bishop Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky (1831- 1906) has deeply influenced Chinese and Korean Christians with two of his Bible translations, that is the Peking Colloquial Old Testament (1875) and the Easy Wenli Version (1902). More specifically, the Korean Revised Version (1938) and Gale’s Korean translation (1925) were heavily indebted to his Easy Wenli Version in terms of their dicta and wordings. In case of the Korean Revised Version (1938), about 60% of its wordings have been influenced by Bishop Shereschewsky’s Easy Wenli Bible (1902).<BR> Schereschewsky was given the title of a mission bishop by the American Episcopal Church after he completed the Peking Colloquial Old Testament (1875). He participated in the project to translate the Bible in colloquial Mandarin. In this project he was in charge of translating the Old Testament because of his excellent knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic. During his translating job, he consulted many commentaries written by Jewish medieval scholars such as Rashi and Ibn Ezra. He also read many German commentaries written by German scholars like de Wette because he had a background of German scholarship that he had gotten in Germany during his teenage years. <BR> His second Bible translation in classic Chinese, Easy Wenli Version (1902), was done by his first Old Testament Version together with the Delegates’s Version in Wenli (1854). As a matter of fact, his first Chinese translation can be said to be the mother version of the Chinese Union Version (1919), which is still in use by Chinese Christians. His second version in Easy Wenli heavily influenced earlier Korean Bibles like the Revised Version (1938) and Gale’s Version (1925). Moreover, his Easy Wenli Bible, together with the Wenli Delegate’s Version, was used by Korean theologians like Rev. Choi Pyung Hun for his theology of indigenization.<BR> In summary, Bishop Schereschewsky was a pioneer in Bible translation in China and Korea by the turn of the last century. Two of his Bibles should be acknowledged as landmarks for Bible translations in Asia.