Abstract
Abstract Lamin Sanneh has influentially observed that translating the Bible is always a seminal act of doing contextual theology. While this has been well demonstrated for the African context, it has rarely been explored for the Asian context. This article examines the Chinese Union Version (cuv) Bible of 1919, a venerated translation that is simply ‘the Bible’ for Chinese Christians. As a result of being mainly the work of Western translators, however, the cuv has lexicalised and sacralised a distinctly western and Protestant understanding of sin as ‘crime’ which has become conventional usage among Chinese Christians. Even so, the linguistic potential for defamiliarising the concept of sin and recasting it in a more contextual manner for Chinese readers already lies within the cuv. Greater attention to the cuv’s concreteness in rendering Old Testament sin-idioms, as opposed to the standard Protestant abstractions, would therefore refresh the voice of Chinese Christianity.
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