Floris Solleveld
University of Bristol

Two unpublished histories of the British and Foreign Bible Society were written in the 1820s to 1830s (BFBS Archives, Cambridge University Library, GBR/0374/BFBS/BSA/E3/8/1 and E3/8/2). It is unclear to me why there were two, both by BFBS staff, written at roughly the same time; they cover much the same topics, figures, and languages and do not express notably strong or divergent views. What is clearer is why they were never published. Both manuscripts are very lengthy compilations of excerpts, transcripts, summaries, and in the case of the largest manuscript, of literal cutting and pasting from printed BFBS reports. All that material is arranged by language, with a chapter for each language into which the Bible was translated before or during that period, and no attempt at overarching narrative or analysis.

The largest of the two manuscripts – in 15 volumes and envelopes of some 200 quarto pages each – was compiled by Thomas Pell Platt, the BFBS librarian from 1822 to 1831 and editor of its Greek, Amharic, and Ethiopic (Geez) versions. By far the largest chapter, filling two half-volumes, is taken up by the Serampore Mission. Serampore was a Danish colony near Calcutta, where a trio of Baptist missionaries churned out the unlikely number of 34 translations between 1800 and1837 (i.e. in part before the BFBS was founded). What makes the chapter so large is also that it is mostly a collage of the successive printed reports of the Serampore Brethren – reports that are otherwise hard to find even in Cambridge University Library. The same goes for Platt’s chapter about Sinhalese (the main language of Sri Lanka), where disagreements between missionaries turned into a veritable translation war. This recycling process makes Platt’s history a valuable historical source despite its lack of originality.

Floris Solleveld
University of Bristol

On 28 May 1940, a group of 33 people met at the British and Foreign Bible Society headquarters (‘Bible House’) in London for a conference on African languages. The evacuation at Dunkirk was under way; the sea was full of U-boats; on the morning of the conference, the news arrived of the Belgian capitulation. What better moment to discuss the state of Biblical translation on the African continent? The conference report contrasted the shared sentiment that “lights were going out one by one in Europe” with the “unquenchable optimism” of those present, “a band of men moving towards the sunlight”; the opening speaker called to mind that the BFBS had also been founded at a time when Napoleon was plotting his invasion of England.

The occasion for the conference was to discuss a series of reports by the BFBS secretary for Africa, W.J. Wiseman, and the outcomes of a questionnaire sent out to missionaries and missionary societies (all in BFBS archives, Cambridge University Library: GBR/0374/BFBS/BSA/F2/9/8, marked as ‘confidential’; no outcomes of the conference seem to have been published). Between 1937 and 1939, Wiseman had made two large inspection tours along missionary stations and Bible colporteurs in sub-Saharan Africa and on the larger islands, covering more than 40,000 miles by plane, boat, lorry, and any other means of transport. The purpose of this was to survey the efficacy of Bible translations. While the BFBS mission was to make the Bible available to all people in their own language, in practice the cost and difficulties associated with producing a full translation – printed and shipped from Britain – were proportionally larger for smaller languages, and the reliability of the translations hard to ascertain except in situ. Meanwhile cheap Bibles were being mass-produced in European languages; Wiseman quotes customer complaints that “The price of a small French New Testament in Douala was 2 francs, while a New Testament in the local language (in the same bookshop) was priced 10 francs. The African cannot understand why prices to Europeans are so much lower. We point out that the books are smaller; then he, too, wants a smaller book.”