Translating Christianity

Brings together scholars to explore the diverse and rich challenges of translating Christianity.

Simon Ditchfield (Edited by), Charlotte Methuen (Edited by), Andrew Spicer (Edited by)

9781108419246, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 June 2017

494 pages
22.4 x 14.2 x 3.4 cm, 0.73 kg

This volume brings together scholars to explore the challenges of translating Christianity. Christianity has been the impulse behind the creation of more dictionaries and grammars of the world's languages than any other force in history. More people pray and worship in more languages in Christianity than in any other religion. It is a religion without a revealed language; a faith characterized by 'the triumph of its translatability'. Christianity is also a translated religion in a very different sense. Many of its ritual practices have been predicated on the translation of material objects, such as relics. Their movement in time and space reveals shifting lines of power and influence in illuminating ways. Translation can be understood not only linguistically and physically but also in ecclesiastical and metaphorical terms, for instance, in the handing on of authority from one place or person to another, or the appropriation of rituals in different contexts.

Introduction Simon Ditchfield
1. Silk road Christians and the translation of Culture in Tang China Scott Fitzgerald Johnson
2. The language of Baptism in early Anglo-Saxon England: the case for Old English Miriam Adan Jones
3. Translating St Alban: Romano-British, Merovingian and Anglo-Saxon cults M. D. Laynesmith
4. Christian Hebraism in twelfth-century Rome: a philologist's correction of the Latin Bible through dialogue with Jewish scholars and their Hebrew texts Marie Thérèse Champagne
5. Translation and appropriation: Greek relics in the Latin West in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade Anne E. Lester
6. Translating the Legenda Aurea in early modern England Morgan Ring
7. Erasmus and the politics of translation in Tudor England Lucy Wooding
8. 'These four letters s o l a are not there': language and theology in Luther's translation of the New Testament Charlotte Methuen
9. Translating Christianity in an age of reformations Simon Ditchfield
10. Nella lingua di ciascuno: church communication between Latin and vernacular during the counter-reformation Silvia Manzi
11. Transmitting and translating the excommunication of Elizabeth I Aislinn Muller
12. Croatian translation of Biblical passages in Medieval performative texts Andrea Radoševi?
13. Translating the Life of Antichrist into German and Czech in the Early Modern Period Alena A. Fidlerová
14. St Pientia and the Château de la Roche-Guyon: relic translations and sacred history in seventeenth-century France Jennifer Hillman
15. Ethnography and cultural translation in the Early Modern Missions Joan-Pau Rubiés
16. Translating feeling: the Bible, affections and Protestantism in England c.1660–c.1750 Michael A. L. Smith
17. Translating Christianity and Buddhism: Catholic missionaries in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Burma Andrew J. Finch
18. John Ross and cultural encounter: translating Christianity in an East Asian context James H. Grayson
19. The Evangelization of Korea, c.1895–1910: translation of the Gospel or reinvention of the Church? Kirsteen Kim
20. The nineteenth-century missionary-translator: reflecting on translation theory through the work of François Coillard (1834–1904) Esther Ruth Liu
21. Lin Shu's translation of Shakespeare's religious motifs in twentieth-century China Jenny Wong
22. 'Playwrights are not Evangelists': Dorothy L. Sayers on translating the Gospels into drama Margaret Wiedemann Hunt
23. Faith in the hearing: Gospel recordings and the World Mission of Joy Ridderhof (1903–84) Darin D. Lenz
24. Speaking to God in Australia: Donald Robinson and the writing of An Australian Prayer Book (1978) R. J. W. Shiner
25. Revisiting 'translatability' and African Christianity: the case of the Christian Catholic Apostolic Church in Zion Joel Cabrita.

Subject Areas: Christian mission & evangelism [HRCX7], Church history [HRCC2], Christianity [HRC], History of religion [HRAX], History [HB]