TRANSLATION

The idea that “the Bible” existed in the early Protestant mission empire is something of a misnomer. Biblical translation was time consuming. Getting agreement on how to translate key terms such as baptism, spirit, and resurrection was arduous. Most mission societies worked through the Bible Society, which generally demanded that all Protestant mission in one language area collaborate on the translation. Diversity of denominational opinion further delayed the process. In some cases, it took half a century before both testaments were translated and published as one volume. “The Bible” could hence exist as a handful of separate booklets that were indistinguishable from other pamphlets (Hofmeyr 2004: 77-9).

Complicating this picture was the way in which the Bible (or parts of it) was changed as it entered new spiritual traditions. In the case of Africa, with some 1,000 languages and as many ethnic groups, the Bible came to be reinterpreted in diverse ways. This “reformation” was possible since Christianity in Africa was spread by Africans. Missionaries were few and far between and were generally culturally remote from the people they proselytized. The work of brokering the gospel fell to the African foot soldiers of Christianity, the catechists, evangelists, and Bible women who knew how best to present new ideas to their audiences.

African Christianity produced distinctive theologies. These included an Africa Christology (Christ as intermediary rather than son of God), a stress on healing, and emphasis on the gifts of the Holy Spirit. In other cases, African Christians “re-biblicized” the Bible, playing up Old Testament themes of prophecy and polygamy that the missionaries sought to downplay (Hastings 1994).

Orality and literacy provided another site for both re- and (in some instances) de-biblicization. Christian sacred texts pivot on a metaphorical conjunction of the oral and the written. God’s oral voice is mediated in print (or manuscript): “The ritual of reading recapitulates the primal experience of speaking and hearing the word of God” (Stock 1990: 149). These themes assumed an added edge when introduced into sub-Saharan societies that were oral or paraliterate. Here ideas of divine orality and literacy were fused in novel ways. In some case, literacy was believed to come directly from God (rather than via the tainted agency of the missionaries) and was conferred miraculously on believers by angels in dreams and visions (Hofmeyr 2006). In a very different instance, the Friday Masowe Church in Zimbabwe refuses to use the Bible because they receive the Word “live and direct” as they say form the Holy Spirit (Engelke 2007).

Isabel Hofmeyr