THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS

The Pilgrim’s Progress was published in to part in 1678 and 1684 in the wake of the English revolution. The first part of the book tells the story of the hero Christian making his way from earth to heaven. The second tells of his wife Christiana and family who follow in his footsteps to join him in heaven.

The book very rapidly became an evangelical classic and traveled beyond England, making its way to Protestant Europe and the New World. Its next major migration came courtesy of the nineteenth-century Protestant mission movement. Drawn largely from Low Church evangelicals to whom The Pilgrim’s Progress was a most beloved book, the movement propagated the text in most parts of the globe, resulting in some 200 versions worldwide.

To understand what fuelled this translation activity, we need to grasp the seminal role of Bunyan’s book in the lives of Protestant evangelicals, poring over the illustrations, and acting out scenes to entertain themselves. As adults, they read Bunyan on a daily basis, and encountered the story in choir service, pageants, dramas, tableaux, magic lantern slides, postcards, and posters. One fan even landscaped his garden as a Pilgrim’s Progress theme park. As a book that was woven into the emotional fabric of everyday life and was featured in conversion narratives, The Pilgrim’s Progress was seen as a user-friendly Bible that summarized the core verities of the Protestant message.

Once these evangelicals became missionaries, they hastened to translate the text. Back home, Nonconformist mission supporters assiduously publicized these translations not only as a way of rising the profile of overseas mission, but to add value to their most beloved writer, who was still regarded as vulgar and theologically suspect by the Anglican establishment. At fundraising meetings, magic lantern slides showed illustrations form foreign editions. Mission periodicals reported on translations and how they were received. In one instance, a mission exhibition showed a live tableau of a missionary translating The Pilgrim’s Progress. Cumulatively, these reports created the idea that the text had miraculous powers of circulation and acted like a mini Bible in converting those it encountered (Hofmeyr 2004: 56-57).