The Bible at the Local Level

Abstract

In spite of the papal permission to translate the Bible into Chinese that the Jesuit China mission received in 1615, there was no complete Catholic translation of the whole Bible in China until the 20th century (1954). The task of translation was considered too difficult and tedious and, in addition, somewhat dangerous and superfluous. A prerequisite for the translation of the Bible was the arduous linguistic work of various missionaries, who faced difficult work indeed with dictionaries, questions of grammar, and the challenges of establishing a Christian terminology. It was only by the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century that Catholic missionaries in China again focused on the idea to combine the Bible with catechism. The translations from and works on the Bible published by the Divine Word Missionaries in Shandong (1882–1950) were without any doubt a partial, but important contribution to the complete Chinese translation of the Bible. This project can be understood as a distinctive achievement in the Bible apostolate at the local level. This article focuses on a wide variety of aspects and levels of this apostolate. Readers find here that the translation of the Bible accomplished much in the dissemination of Biblical knowledge, certainly not only in South Shandong.