Translations of parts of the Bible are known to have existed in only seven Asian and four African languages before the 15th century. In the 17th century Dutch merchants began to interest themselves in the missionary enterprise among non-Europeans. A pioneer was Albert Cornelius Ruyl, who is credited with having translated Matthew into High Malay in 1629, Mark following later. Jan van Hasel translated the two other Gospels in 1646 and added Psalms and Acts in 1652. Other traders began translations into Minnan, a form of Southern Min spoken by the Hoklo (Fukien Taiwanese), in 1661 and Sinhalese in 1739.

A complete printed Japanese New Testament reputedly existed in Miyako in 1613, the work of Jesuits. The first known printed New Testament in Asia appeared in 1715 in the Tamil language, produced by Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, a Lutheran missionary. A complete Bible followed in 1727. Six years later the first Bible in High Malay came out.

The distinction of having produced the first New Testament in any indigenous language of the Americas belongs to John Eliot, a Puritan missionary, who made it accessible to Native Americans in Massachusetts in 1661. Two years later he brought out the Massachusetts Indian Bible, the first Bible to be printed on the American continent.

By 1800 the number of non-European versions had not exceeded 13 Asian, 4 African, 3 American, and 1 Oceanian. With the founding of missionary societies after 1800, however, new translations were viewed as essential to the evangelical effort. First came renderings in those languages that already possessed a written literature. A group at Serampore, India, headed by William Carey, a Baptist missionary, produced 28 versions in Indian languages. Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to China, produced a Mandarin New Testament in 1814 and a complete Bible by 1823. Adoniram Judson, an American missionary, rendered the Bible into Burmese in 1834.

With European exploration of the African continent often came the need to invent an alphabet, and in many instances the translated Scriptures constituted the first piece of a written literature there. In the 19th century the Bible was translated into Amharic, Malagasy, Tswana, Xosa, and Ga.

In North America James Evans invented a syllabary for the use of Cree people, in whose language the Bible was available in 1862, the work of Wesleyan missionary W. Mason. The New Testament appeared in Ojibwa in 1833, and the whole Bible was translated for the Dakota peoples in 1879. The Labrador Eskimos had a New Testament in 1826 and a complete Bible in 1871.

In Oceania the New Testament was rendered into Tahitian and Javanese in 1829 and into Hawaiian and Low Malay in 1835. By 1854 the whole Bible had appeared in all but the last of these languages as well as in Rarotonga (1851).

In the 20th century the trend toward the development of non-European Bible translations was characterized by an attempt to produce “union” or “standard” versions in the common language underlying different dialects. One such is the Swahili translation (1950) that makes the Scriptures accessible to most of East Africa. Within the realm of non-European translation there has also been a movement for the updating of versions to bring them into line with the spoken language, especially through the use of indigenous Christian scholars. The first example of this was the colloquial Japanese version of 1955.

By 1970 some part, if not all, of the Bible had been translated into more than 100 languages or dialects spoken in India and into over 300 in Africa.

Background and beginnings

The geographical theatre of the Old Testament is the ancient Near East, particularly the Fertile Crescent region, running from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers up to Syria and down through Palestine to the Nile Delta. In this area great civilizations and empires developed and seminomadic ethnic groups, such as the Hebrews, were involved in the mixture of peoples and cultures. The exact origin of the Hebrews is not known with certainty, but the biblical tradition of their origin in a clan that migrated from Mesopotamia to Canaan (Palestine) early in the 2nd millennium bce has analogues in what is known of the movements of other groups in that area and period. There are, moreover, obvious Mesopotamian motifs in biblical cosmogony and primeval history in the early part of the Bible, and Mesopotamian place-names are the obvious bases of some of the personal names of the clan’s forebears. Canaanite influences are evident in the Hebrew alphabet, poetry, and certain mythological themes. Linguistic and other similarities with neighbouring Semitic peoples, such as the Amorites and Moabites, are also evident.