Missionary Bibles that Shaped African Christianity – Their Translation and Translators: Examples from Colonial West Africa

Abstract Recent studies in world Christianity have established that the missionary mother-tongue Bibles contributed essentially to the rise of indigenous forms of Christianity and its meteoric growth in Africa. However, these studies hardly give attention to the background processes that advanced missionary Bible translations. Yet attention to these background processes will provide a more holistic and nuanced account of the incalculable impact of missionary Bible translations on African Christianity. Using a case study approach and through a close reading of archival data on two missionary Bible translations in West Africa: the Ga Bible (1854–1866) of the Basel Mission and the Ewe Bible (1858–1913) of the North German Mission, this article reconstructs the multi-step background processes that produced these pioneering translations in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. Through this longitudinal approach, the article widens and nuances existing understanding of the creative nexus between the Bible and Christianity in Africa by arguing that the impact of missionary-translated Bibles on African Christianity was co-determined by intercultural background processes which defined the kind of biblical texts that African Christian converts read/heard and appropriated in their mother tongues.