The ‘Without Note or Comment’ Principle in Dispute

The BFBS was founded in London in 1804 as an interdenominational Protestant institution promoting universal diffusion of the Bible. To solicit support from different Protestant denominations by avoiding sectarian or theological controversy, the founders of the BFBS agreed unanimously to exclude any note or comment of a doctrinal or practical character from the Bibles it published and distributed.Footnote ³ This ‘without note or comment’ principle helped the BFBS to garner vital financial support to grow into a global Protestant institution during the nineteenth century. On its fiftieth anniversary, the BFBS had already sponsored the distribution, printing or translation of the Bible in one hundred and fifty-two languages or dialects. When it celebrated its centenary, the BFBS had circulated Bibles in three hundred and eleven languages.Footnote ⁴

Because of its importance as the Law I in the BFBS's constitution,Footnote ⁵ the ‘without note or comment’ principle was steadfastly implemented by the BFBS in its global enterprise of Bible publishing and distribution. The BFBS's work in China was no exception. When Alexander Wylie was appointed as its agent in China in 1863, the BFBS instructed him clearly to circulate Bibles without admixture of any other books or writings, no matter “how good and excellent so ever [sic] in themselves”.Footnote ⁶ Wylie declared at a missionary meeting in Shanghai in 1868 that since his agency's commencement, he had never distributed a page of other matter along with the Bible. He rejoiced in doing so, believing that there was a power inherent in the very words of the Bible “to apply the truth to the heart and conscience”.Footnote ⁷

The ‘without note or comment’ principle was underpinned by the BFBS's belief that the Bible is a “single, self-contained, coherent text”, Footnote ⁸ which was derived from the idea of the self-sufficiency of the Bible, one of the central assumptions of evangelicalism.Footnote ⁹ To the BFBS, ‘sufficiency’ had a twofold meaning. First, the Bible contains all things necessary to salvation. In N. T. Wright's words, “Nothing beyond the Bible is to be taught as requiring to be believed in order to be saved”.Footnote ¹⁰ Second, the Bible is its own interpreter. The Bible's main messages are sufficiently clear to unprejudiced readers. The Bible's clearest passages provide all the light necessary to illuminate more obscure verses.Footnote ¹¹ Hence, the BFBS's duty was to distribute the Bible as widely as possible and the biblical text itself would do the rest.Footnote ¹²

However, Sue Zemka rightly observed that the Protestant belief in the Bible's self-sufficiency for Christian interpretation clearly met a new challenge in the missionary experience of Asia, Africa, and India, because the linguistic, cultural, and educational differences threatened to expose the Bible as a culturally relative text.Footnote ¹³ Simply distributing Bibles without any helps to the Chinese might not have been very effective in converting the Chinese to Protestantism, as the early history of Protestant mission work in China shows that the dispersion of hundreds of thousands of religious tracts and Chinese Bibles without any follow-up instruction appears to have yielded few converts.Footnote ¹⁴ For example, the number of Protestant communicants in China was only three hundred and fifty in 1853 and some two thousand five hundred in 1863.Footnote ¹⁵ The number of Chinese Protestants was very small compared with the huge population of the Qing Empire, which then stood at about three hundred fifty million to four hundred million.Footnote ¹⁶

After the Treaties of Tientsin (Tianjin) and the Convention of Peking (Beijing) were signed in 1858 and 1860 respectively, Protestant missionaries were allowed to gradually extend their work into the inner parts of China, instead of confining themselves to the treaty ports. Elijah Bridgman, the first American Protestant missionary to China, claimed in the early 1830s that “Buddhism. . .has worked its way into every nook and corner of the empire, through all the grades of society, by means of books without the aid of teachers”.Footnote ¹⁷ However, having more personal, direct contact with the Chinese people, Protestant missionaries in the second half of the nineteenth century found that Bridgman's claim did not apply to Christianity. Cultural and religious discrepancies between Chinese society and the societies depicted in the Bible made it difficult for a Chinese to understand the Bible simply from its plain text. Without explanation, for instance, what would the Chinese make of the feasts which occurred so frequently in biblical times such as the feasts of the Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles? How would they view Jesus washing his disciples’ feet? Could they get the Christian meaning of holiness by simply looking at its Chinese translation sheng 聖, which could denote human perfection in the Confucian sense?Footnote ¹⁸

Hence, although Wylie polemically claimed that Protestant missionaries were all united in the Bible as an “article of faith”,Footnote ¹⁹ he could not avoid their criticism of the ‘without note or comment’ principle. In his contribution to the Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal in 1870, M. J. Knowlton of the American Baptist Missionary Union bluntly stated that Bible circulation without living expositors and without note or comment was overrated as a means of evangelisation.Footnote ²⁰ Knowlton was not alone, as he was supported by his fellows from different missions in the years to come. At the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China in Shanghai in 1877 (hereafter the Shanghai Conference 1877),Footnote ²¹ Hudson Taylor, the founder of the China Inland Mission, argued that distributing plain Bibles to the uninstructed people was the most unsuccessful and sometimes even hurtful Christian effort. Seeing the conference as a suitable arena of public discussion on the ‘without note or comment’ principle, Taylor overtly appealed for the sentiments of his “able and experienced brethren” being plainly uttered on the issue.Footnote ²² According to the records of the conference, “in the opinion of the General Conference” it was highly desirable that “the Holy Scriptures designed for circulation in China should be accompanied with a short preface, captions and brief, unsectarian notes”. Hence, the conference resolved to request “the various Bible Societies in Europe and America”, i.e. the BFBS, the American Bible Society (ABS) and the NBSS, to permit the inclusion of these features in their Chinese Bible editions, subject to the supervision of their respective committees in China.Footnote ²³

In addition to providing financial aid to Bible translators, the BFBS, the ABS and the NBSS almost monopolised Bible publishing and distribution in late Qing and Republican China. These Bible societies can be regarded collectively as the ‘Big Three’ in Chinese Protestant Bible translation, publishing and distribution of that era.Footnote ²⁴ Thus, the attitudes of the ‘Big Three’ to the resolution of the Shanghai Conference 1877 were influential in determining whether the Bibles received by the Chinese would remain unannotated or not. Despite regarding itself as “the steward of modern Christendom in translating and distributing the Scriptures”,Footnote ²⁵ the BFBS disregarded the request from those it served. The ABS and the NBSS, which also adopted the ‘without note or comment’ principle in their constitutions,Footnote ²⁶ partly responded to the resolution of the Shanghai Conference 1877. While reiterating in 1878 that “prefaces and comments are inadmissible”, the ABS's committee on versions agreed that “condensed page-headings and chapter headings, conformed to those found in the Authorized English Bible may be introduced when desired”.Footnote ²⁷ The NBSS took it a little further by issuing an edition of the New Testament in Mandarin with chapter headings and maps in 1879.Footnote ²⁸ All in all, the ‘Big Three’ were not yet ready to allow insertion of a short preface and brief, unsectarian notes into the Chinese Bible.

Protestant missionaries in China did not give up their lobbying. The issue of adding explanatory notes to the Chinese Bible was raised again when another General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China was held in Shanghai in 1890 (hereafter the Shanghai Conference 1890). A sub-committee was specially formed to discuss “the need of brief introductions and notes to the Scriptures, and on Bible distribution” in depth.Footnote ²⁹ The difficulty facing the ‘Big Three’ was not unknown to missionaries at the conference. H. C. Du Bose of the American Southern Presbyterian Mission reminded his fellows that “let us remember that the money is given to these [Bible] Societies on condition that the Bible shall be published ‘without note or comment’”.Footnote ³⁰ Appealing to the ‘Big Three’ for change, however, set the tone of discussion. A veteran Protestant missionary in China at that time, Alexander Williamson, who had formerly been the NBSS's agent in China,Footnote ³¹ was the key figure in this campaign. Singing his swansong as he died shortly after the Shanghai Conference 1890, Williamson argued that a missionary who distributed Bibles without notes was like “a man to work with one arm tied behind his back”. He challenged the idea of a pure and uninterpreted Bible's omnipotence implied by the ‘without note or comment’ principle, because in his opinion the Bible is self–interpreting to those equipped for the task but not to the unlearnt.Footnote ³² Stressing the need for explanatory notes, he appealed to the authority of the Bible, quoting the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8:30–31:

Williamson suggested some kinds of notes to be inserted into the Chinese Bible. They can be roughly categorised as follows: (1) historical and geographical notes, (2) ethnological notes, (3) notes on the manners and customs depicted in the Bible, (4) notes on Christian words without equivalent in the Chinese language, (5) allusions, and (6) proper terms such as the names and titles of Jesus.Footnote ³⁴

Obviously the ‘Big Three’ were targeted. While they all sent delegates to the Shanghai Conference 1890, it was William Wright, the BFBS's editorial superintendent, who responded to the appeal and criticisms from the missionaries attending the conference. Wright was the highest-ranking staff member among all delegates of the ‘Big Three’, since both the ABS and the NBSS did not send any representative from their headquarters to the conference.Footnote ³⁵ Wright tried to pacify his brethren in China by responding to part of their requests. He told them that he believed the BFBS might allow short explanations of such words as Pharisee and Sadducee. Wright also said, “I do not see why we should not explain Shang-ti (Shangdi 上帝) as ‘the true God,’ Baptism as ‘a Religious Rite,’ etc.”. Geographical, ethnic and philological expressions might be explained by words that would be equivalent to alternative readings, which he was prepared to recommend the BFBS to include in its Chinese Bibles.Footnote ³⁶

Unsurprisingly, Wright made use of inter-denominationalism to justify the BFBS's inability to satisfy all the missionaries wanted. He explained that the BFBS “cannot go in for theological definitions, which would only represent the shade of opinion of a portion of our [i.e. the BFBS's] supporters”.Footnote ³⁷ He even related the debate to “the question between Luther and the Pope”, saying “the Pope did not consider the Bible without ‘notes’ a safe book in the hands of the people”.Footnote ³⁸ Here Wright regarded the BFBS as a true follower of the Protestant Reformation, defending the Christian truth from institutional reading of the Bible. The anti-popery discourse was used to identify the critics of the ‘without note or comment’ principle as a threat to Protestantism. Implying that missionaries should solicit help from other organisations for annotated Bibles, he said,

Nonetheless, missionaries at the Shanghai Conference 1890 were determined and took the initiative to improve the prospects of Bible distribution in China. Instead of waiting for the ‘Big Three’ to take action, the conference resolved to form a committee to prepare “summaries, headings and brief explanations” and to urge the ‘Big Three’ to publish Chinese Bibles including them.Footnote ⁴⁰ This was regarded by the editors of the conference's records as second in importance only to the resolution to translate the Union Versions of the Chinese Bible.Footnote ⁴¹ The use of the term ‘explanations’ instead of ‘notes’ here was to avoid infringing the constitutions of the ‘Big Three’. The formation of this special committee, which shall consist of two Baptists, two Congregationalists, two Episcopalians, one German Reformed Protestant, one German Lutheran, two Methodists and two Presbyterians,Footnote ⁴² addressed the concern of the ‘Big Three’ about interdenominational support. The ‘Big Three’ were attentive to whether explanatory notes would provoke sectarian or theological bias. When such notes were compiled by a committee whose members represented different denominations, the ‘Big Three’ should have no excuse for rejecting them.

While the resolution was deemed acceptable to Wright,Footnote ⁴³ the BFBS actually shelved it, despite having agreed in 1893 to publish editions of the Chinese Bible with short paragraph headings and brief explanations.Footnote ⁴⁴ The special committee appointed by the Shanghai Conference 1890 submitted to the BFBS a draft of summaries, chapter-headings and brief explanations of Matthew in 1897. However, as G. H. Bondfield, the BFBS's agent in China from 1895 to 1923, recalled, “Nothing came of this”.Footnote ⁴⁵

The BFBS's evasiveness about the issue of adding explanatory readings to the Chinese Bible throughout the decades can be explained by the conflicting views of the BFBS and Protestant missionaries in China on the self-sufficiency of the Bible. The BFBS never rejected the view that the Protestant Church has the duty of interpretation. Nevertheless, the BFBS insisted that supplying comments on and interpretations of the Bible is the task for those whom it belongs to as their special duty.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the context of China as a mission field, Protestant missionaries were those who held such a responsibility. Samuel Dyer, Bondfield's predecessor, said,

Also, the BFBS believed that the Bible speaks for itself and overpowers its readers according to God's will. As Wright defended the BFBS's position at the Shanghai Conference 1890,

In other words, the self-sufficiency of the Bible transcended the boundaries of languages and cultures. The problem of one's ability to read the Bible did not really matter, as understanding depended on the reader's heart. The Holy Spirit would guide an inquiring mind to understand the saving knowledge.Footnote ⁴⁹ The biblical text was all which its Chinese reader needed.

The idea of the Chinese Bible's self-sufficiency as its own interpreter was endorsed by the BFBS's logo-centric view of Bible translation. According to this view, a text's conceptual message (the Word of God) is more important than its physical stuff (the language of the translated Bible). Meaning can be removed from one container-text (the source text) and replaced into another container-text (the translated text) without serious damage to the meaning itself.Footnote ⁵⁰ This justifies the equal sacredness of the original and translated texts of the Bible and legitimises Bible translation. Therefore, “the multiplicity of languages, like the multiplicity of Bibles, is merely a nominal plurality”.Footnote ⁵¹ If the Bible is translated literally in an “idiom of unadorned, plain-style prose, free from rhetorical embellishment”,Footnote ⁵² the translated text will be a faithful transmission of the Word of God and the clarity of biblical messages transposed to the translation too.

To many Protestant missionaries in China, the Bible's self-sufficiency as its own interpreter was questionable concerning the Chinese people. For instance, in his submission to the Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal in 1869, F. S. Turner of the London Missionary Society pointed out that it was the situation of Christian lands that contributed to the presumption in favour of the Bible instead of the Gospel, which Bible societies believed in. He highlighted the need “to apprehend clearly that to the heathen the argument, ‘the Bible says so,’ is simply naught”.Footnote ⁵³ C. G. Sparham, who also belonged to the London Missionary Society, made his remark at the Shanghai Conference 1890,

‘Self-interpreting’ is a relative term. The Bible is sufficient to be self-interpreting only to those who can read and have some preparatory knowledge of its contents.Footnote ⁵⁵ Both the BFBS and Protestant missionaries in China agreed on the Bible's self-sufficiency as the source of saving knowledge and the supreme authority of the Bible in the Church. However, being more realistic, the latter in general admitted that without either written or spoken help, it would be difficult for the Chinese as a non-Christian people to understand the Bible simply from its text. Thus, the “‘pure word of God’ is not given to the Chinese until we [missionaries] use such terms and means as make it plain”, said Williamson at the Shanghai Conference 1890.Footnote ⁵⁶

Daniel Arichea correctly reminded us that the Bible is a human book and no theological assertion can deny or undermine this fact.Footnote ⁵⁷ The writing of the Bible was undoubtedly influenced by the prevalent culture of its day and bound by the authors’ ideologies, from which difficulties in understanding the Bible could arise. In a nutshell, Protestant missionaries in China who appealed for annotated Chinese Bibles attempted to deal with the nature of the Bible as a human literature, whereas the BFBS downplayed it and emphasised the Bible's divine origin and character.

It is thus unsurprising that the BFBS and Protestant missionaries in China perceived differently the importance of colportage, i.e. Bible distribution by colporteurs. To the missionaries, the need to explain the Bible to the Chinese as a non-Christian people meant that in evangelisation, preaching would be more important than colportage, if the Bibles distributed were plain ones. Preaching paved the way for colportage. Taylor even suggested that if he must leave either out, let it be colportage; If either must be abridged, let it be colportage and not preaching.Footnote ⁵⁸ The importance of preaching was stressed by some Chinese church workers too. “Although the Bible is the most precious book in the world, it has to be proclaimed and elucidated to the world so to have an effect on the people”, said Chiang Yao-t’ing (Jiang Yaoting 蔣耀庭), a China Inland Mission pastor in Wenzhou.Footnote ⁵⁹

From the BFBS's perspective, by putting forward the precedence of preaching over colportage, Protestant missionaries would be implicitly involved in undermining the uniqueness and the power of the Bible, as it seemed to suggest that the Bible would effect conversion only after preaching. Also, boosting the importance of preachers’ interpretations could risk playing down the significance of individual reading of the Bible, which the BFBS strove to avoid.

Considering their interdependence in respect of Chinese Bible translation and circulation, the BFBS surely did not want to harm its relationship with Protestant missionaries in China.Footnote ⁶⁰ Nevertheless, the BFBS dared not take the risk of altering its ‘without note or comment’ principle, lest its home supporters stop their donations as they thought that the BFBS's confidence in its fundamental beliefs had been shaken. The BFBS's work in China relied much on the financial support from Protestants in the United Kingdom who perceived themselves as having a share in the Christianising mission of the British Empire.Footnote ⁶¹ Their donations helped cover the cost of free Bible distribution in China and enabled the BFBS to sell Chinese Bibles at heavily discounted prices. For example, it was claimed that the cost price of a Chinese Gospel, which was sold at seven wen 文 in 1905, was in fact more than fifty wen.Footnote ⁶²

No matter how hard the BFBS worked to defend its ‘without note or comment’ principle, it could not conceal the need for some explanatory readings in the Chinese Bible, especially when its staff in China also felt the need. Replying to inquiries from the Committee of the BFBS, which was the governing body of the BFBS, about the society's work in China in 1888, all agents of the BFBS in China opined that considerable departure from the ‘without note or comment’ principle was the only way they could expect to gain greater sympathy and assistance from missionaries, since “a very large proportion” of them were convinced of the comparative uselessness of Bibles without note or comment.Footnote ⁶³ Evan Bryant, the BFBS's agent in North China, gave a vivid example which demonstrates how some proper terms in the Chinese Bible without explanation could cause a great deal of confusion to the Chinese:

Moreover, distributing Chinese Bibles without note or comment could backfire. In 1892, a memorandum was issued by the British Foreign Office to British missionary societies regarding anti-Christian riots in China.Footnote ⁶⁵ The memorandum urged British missionaries in China to take measures “to disarm misconstruction and avoid exciting susceptibilities”. One of the suggested measures in the memorandum is specifically for Bible societies:

Why were Joshua, Judges, Ruth and the Song of Solomon mentioned here? The entry of the Israelites into Cannan, their conquest and division of the land depicted in Joshua could be related to the defeats of late Qing China in wars with foreign powers, reinforcing the perception that the purpose of missionary activities was to help foreign powers conquer China. In Judges, God punished the Israelites owing to their worship of other gods by handing them to enemies. This could be appropriated to justify the criticism that Christianity was hostile to the Chinese who worshipped their own deities. If not explained, the re-marriage of Ruth after her first husband's death and the explicit sexual imagery in the Song of Solomon would lend support to the anti-Christian discourse that the teachings of the Bible were immoral and lascivious.Footnote ⁶⁷

According to the BFBS's reply to the Foreign Office, none of the Old Testament books mentioned was put in circulation by its agents in China.Footnote ⁶⁸ However, it does not mean that the Foreign Office's suggestion hampered the BFBS's faith in Bibles ‘without note or comment’, as in 1894 the BFBS issued a new edition of Proverbs in Mandarin for circulation.Footnote ⁶⁹ The memorandum was also sent to other British missionary societies, which means their missionaries in China would have been informed of it as a kind of work advice.Footnote ⁷⁰ Indeed, the North China Daily News, “the most influential of the foreign newspapers” in China during the 1890s,Footnote ⁷¹ chronicled the contents of the memorandum on 8^th April 1892.Footnote ⁷² Although to the best of my knowledge no explicit citation from the memorandum was found in missionaries’ writings on the ‘without note or comment’ principle, the memorandum very likely boosted the missionaries’ confidence in the belief that Bibles with explanatory notes were in need in China, which was echoed by the North China Daily News. Welcoming the issue of the memorandum by the Foreign Office, the newspaper's editorial on the same day criticised the insistence of the ‘Big Three’ on publishing Chinese Bibles without note or comment, labelling such a practice as a “fraud” on their supporters and the Chinese people:

Following in the Footsteps of the Scots: The BFBS's Introduction of Translational Helps for the Chinese Bible

As both the BFBS and Protestant missionaries in China held strong faith in their divergent views on the ‘without note or comment’ principle, a trigger for breakthrough was needed. Leslie Howsam argued that the tension between spiritual ends and commercial means was to shape the policies of the BFBS throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁴ Confronting the rising threat to its work in China from the NBSS, the BFBS could no longer duck the difficult decision.

Humbly describing the NBSS's work in China, John Archibald wrote, “the N.B.S.S., representing, as it does, a small country, and not over wealthy, could hardly be expected to match the great Bible Societies of England and America”.Footnote ⁷⁵ However, as the latest Bible society entering China, the NBSS made remarkable progress in its work in China. While the NBSS issued about four hundred thousand Chinese Bibles within the two decades after Williamson became its first agent in China in 1863, the number for the period from 1884 to 1893 soared to near two million.Footnote ⁷⁶

The rise of the NBSS in China could be largely attributed to its flexibility and quick response to missionaries’ appeals. Issuing Chinese New Testaments with chapter headings and maps, as mentioned earlier, is just an example. When being invited to become the NBSS's agent in China, Williamson asked the NBSS for permission to allow the sale of evangelical books and tracts along with the Bible. The NBSS agreed and such a policy was reaffirmed after the Shanghai Conference 1877.Footnote ⁷⁷

As for the ‘without note or comment’ principle, four years before the Shanghai Conference 1890 was convened, the NBSS already expressed its willingness to consider any annotations on the four Gospels provided by “a representative Committee of missionaries”, even though the NBSS did not make any pledge. The NBSS was afraid that publishing annotated Chinese Bibles would weaken the testimony it bore, “in common with all Bible Societies, to the inspiration and sufficiency of Holy Scriptures”. Like the BFBS, the NBSS was concerned about the responses from its supporters.Footnote ⁷⁸ Yet, the NBSS eventually approved in 1892 the printing of “Gospels with simple Annotations to give some explanation of words, terms and place-names which were completely unfamiliar to the non-Christian reader”.Footnote ⁷⁹ The NBSS's first annotated Chinese Gospel was its annotated edition of Mark published in 1893. Afterwards, the NBSS became the sole Bible society in China supplying annotated Gospels for almost twenty years. Its annotated edition of Matthew was published in 1896. By the end of 1899, the annotated editions of Luke, John and Acts had also been printed by the NBSS's press in Hankou.Footnote ⁸⁰

The NBSS's action was well received and regarded as capable of meeting the need. As shown in the NBSS's Quarterly Record published in July 1893, praises were received from some influential Protestant missionaries in China such as William Muirhead of the London Missionary Society and Taylor of the China Inland Mission.Footnote ⁸¹ The North China Daily News praised the NBSS for taking the lead among Bible societies in China.Footnote ⁸² Even in the Republican era, the NBSS annotated Gospels still received commendations for their usefulness, including those from Chinese Protestants.Footnote ⁸³ By the end of 1905, almost two and a half million copies of the NBSS annotated Gospels and Acts had been issued.Footnote ⁸⁴ According to Bondfield's report, the NBSS published its annotations on the Chinese Bible first with the versions in Easy Wenli (qian wenli 淺文理), which denoted a simplified form of literary Chinese, and Mandarin produced by Griffith John of the London Missionary Society, and later with the Mandarin Union Version as soon as it was ready in 1907. Since this was done their circulation in North China alone had doubled.Footnote ⁸⁵

The rising competition from the NBSS alarmed the giant. China was indispensable to the BFBS as she accounted for the largest share of the BFBS's work in Asia.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, with the help of annotated Gospels, the NBSS was gradually encroaching on the BFBS's territories. Shortly after the publication of the NBSS annotated edition of Mark, R.T. Turley, who worked for the BFBS in Manchuria, warned that if the BFBS could not equal the NBSS, the friends of the BFBS would be “shortly tempted to get their books from Hankow [i.e. Hankou]”. Footnote ⁸⁷ As Bondfield observed in 1907,

Decision-makers of the BFBS in London were not ignorant of the potential threat from the NBSS. They even cautioned the ABS that the popularity of the NBSS annotated Gospels would result in missionaries’ withdrawal from both Bible societies.Footnote ⁸⁹ However, the BFBS was not determined to move forward until 1909, when Bondfield tabled the proposal of W. E. Blackstone on behalf of the Bible Distribution Fund in Los Angeles to distribute Mandarin Gospels and Acts with introduction and marginal notes. To promote Bible circulation in China, the Bible Distribution Fund agreed to grant ten thousand Mexican dollars (about eight hundred and seventy-five British pounds) to the BFBS, if it was willing to print and distribute the above mentioned editions. A similar proposal was made to the ABS and the NBSS too. If the arrangement worked satisfactorily, the fund would continue the grant annually for five years. The plan of the Bible Distribution Fund was supported by a petition signed by one hundred and fifty-seven Protestant missionaries in China. They include leading figures in the missionary circle in China such as Griffith John and Timothy Richard.Footnote ⁹⁰

The BFBS could have given evasive answers to the petition, like how it reacted to the resolution of the Shanghai Conference 1890. Nevertheless, the BFBS had to take action this time, since the situation it was facing was like a life-and-death one. Persuading the BFBS's headquarters in London to accept Blackstone's proposal, Bondfield stressed, “We have come to the point in China where we must either relinquish our position or go forward”. Had it not been for strong personal links between the BFBS's staff and Protestant missionaries and for the opportunities of making personal appeals, the BFBS should have lost, for instance, half its constituency in Manchuria within three years because of its failure to supply annotated Gospels.Footnote ⁹¹ However, the BFBS could not merely rely on its staff's connections to retain support for its work in China. Because of annotated Gospels, many missionaries who were members of the BFBS's local corresponding committees had already employed colporteurs from the NBSS instead of the BFBS. Moreover, native churches having an unqualified preference for annotated Gospels were organising their own evangelistic activities. They would get supplies of Chinese Bibles without missionaries’ intervention.Footnote ⁹² If the BFBS rejected but the NBSS accepted Blackstone's proposal, the NBSS with the grant from the Bible Distribution Fund would further expand its work in China at the expense of the BFBS.Footnote ⁹³

Hence, following in its Scottish counterpart's footsteps, the BFBS appointed in 1910 an ad-hoc sub-committee to draft a set of explanatory readings called translational helps for Matthew in Chinese.Footnote ⁹⁴ The first BFBS edition of Matthew in Chinese with the approved translational helps was published in 1911. Subsequently, translational helps for other three Gospels and Acts in Chinese were drafted. Those for Mark, Luke and John were approved in 1913 and those for Acts in 1916.Footnote ⁹⁵ In addition to Mandarin, the BFBS published editions of Gospels and Acts with translational helps in literary Chinese, Easy Wenli and Cantonese.Footnote ⁹⁶

The publication of Chinese Gospels and Acts with translational helps, however, does not mean that the BFBS gave up its ‘without note or comment’ principle. First of all, the term ‘translational helps’ was used to show the BFBS's supporters that these were not notes or comments infringing the BFBS's constitution.Footnote ⁹⁷ The BFBS emphasised that every such addition “must be limited to an honest attempt to provide an adequate rendering of the original text, and must not be of the nature of interpretation”.Footnote ⁹⁸ Thus, translational helps, according to the BFBS's explanation, would not provoke doctrinal or sectarian controversy. Second, the BFBS's Chinese translational helps were only seen as exceptional and temporary. The BFBS claimed that as soon as the necessity for these helps ceased, they should be discontinued.Footnote ⁹⁹ The BFBS held an optimistic belief that a nation's development in Christian knowledge would one day reach a stage when the difficulty in understanding the Bible no longer exists. Although the BFBS's Chinese translational helps were not drawn up as specimens, principles framing them were incorporated into the BFBS's rules for Bible translators in 1911, which became the BFBS's guidelines for consideration of similar applications from other mission fields in the future.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

It is noteworthy that, contrary to Thor Strandenaes's assertion, the ABS continued to refuse to give in.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The ABS received Blackstone's proposal too. However, its committee on versions declined to grant permission for publishing and distributing annotated Chinese Bibles at its meeting on 27^th January 1910.Footnote ¹⁰² Commenting on the BFBS's introduction of Chinese Gospels with translational helps, John Fox, one of the ABS's corresponding secretaries, wrote in 1915, “I am sorry the British have surrendered”.Footnote ¹⁰³

The ABS's firm stance on the ‘without note or comment’ principle did not prevent the BFBS from adding translational helps to the Chinese Bible. This was mainly because of national preference among Protestant missionaries in choosing which Bible society to be their Bible supplier. As Eric M. North of the ABS pointed out, for instance, during the last decade of the nineteenth century, “the missionaries to whom the Society [i.e. the ABS] was so related were of all the American missions and a few other missions. (The BFBS and the NBSS also at work served the missionaries of their nationality and some others.)”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Concerning nationality, the BFBS and the NBSS were generally conceived as ‘British’ organisations. The BFBS thus faced direct competition in China from the NBSS rather than from the ABS. In other words, the ABS's firm stance on the ‘without note or comment’ principle could have been a moral support to the BFBS. However, this did not help save the BFBS from its plight.

Help is from God? A Comparison between the BFBS's Translational Helps for and the NBSS's Annotations on the Chinese Bible

The introduction of Chinese translational helps was an expedient measure of the BFBS to deal with the crisis facing its work in China. What concerned the BFBS most was still its ‘without note or comment’ principle, which embodied its optimistic belief in the Bible's self-sufficiency and an individual's right and ability to interpret the Bible. The difficult question for the BFBS was no longer ‘to add or not to add’, but how to add wisely. By compiling its own version of annotations, i.e. translational helps, the BFBS was able to exercise control over the contents and extent of explanatory readings to be added to its Chinese Bibles. The BFBS therefore turned its translational helps into a means to defend its ideology.

The following textual analysis of the BFBS's Chinese translational helps illustrates that the BFBS only prepared a relatively small number of explanatory readings for the Chinese Bible. Also, the BFBS included minimal explanatory information about the Bible in its Chinese translational helps. To the BFBS, “only in cases of absolute necessity ought any such helps to be introduced” and they should distract attention from the main text of the Bible “as little as possible”.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The limitations of the BFBS's translational helps are foregrounded by the comparison between them and the NBSS's annotations, which shows the NBSS was more attentive to the unfamiliarity of the Bible to the Chinese and the need for cultural mediation between the Bible and its Chinese readers.

The BFBS's translational helps selected for analysis come from the first BFBS edition of Matthew in Chinese with translational helps, which was published in 1911.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The NBSS's annotations chosen for comparison appear in the NBSS annotated edition of Matthew in Chinese published in 1917.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Both editions follow the text of Matthew in the Mandarin Union Version. Unable to locate any NBSS annotated edition of Matthew in Chinese published in 1911, I consulted the one published in 1899, the biblical text of which follows Griffith John's Mandarin version. I also compared the NBSS's Chinese annotations in this edition with the BFBS's translational helps in the BFBS editions of Matthew in the Mandarin Union Version published in 1914, 1916 and 1917. The comparison shows that both the BFBS's translational helps for and the NBSS's annotations on Matthew in Chinese basically remained the same throughout the years concerned. Therefore, the comparison of these explanatory readings should be on an equal footing.

The minimalist tendency of the BFBS is first indicated by the number of translational helps it introduced into the Chinese Bible. The total number of verses in Matthew in the Mandarin Union Version is one thousand and seventy-one. The BFBS allowed only ninety-three translational helps for this Gospel. On average one translational help per about eleven to twelve verses was provided. However, the NBSS offered more than twice as many explanatory readings as the BFBS did, i.e. two hundred and twenty-two annotations.

Of course the number of explanatory readings itself should not be the sole indicator of the extent of helpfulness. Both Bible societies claimed to aim at offering some explanations of words, terms, personal names and place names completely unfamiliar to non-Christian readers.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Nevertheless, to the BFBS, which strongly believed in the Bible's self-explanatory power and an individual's ability to interpret the Bible, very brief information or simply a reference to a particular biblical verse was already an adequate explanation of something completely unfamiliar to Chinese Bible readers. When explaining who Jesus was in Matthew 1:1, for instance, the BFBS simply referred to Jesus as jiuzhu 救主 (saviour) and asked the reader to find out more in 1:21. The NBSS was more sympathetic to the Chinese without prior knowledge of the Bible. The NBSS's annotation on the same verse tells the Chinese that the name ‘Jesus’ is “a transliteration from the spoken language of Judea. When translated, it means ‘saviour’. Jesus is the only saviour of the people in the world”. Another example is the explanation of leaven in 16:6. Again the BFBS's translational help just refers the reader to 16:12 for the meaning of leaven, whereas the NBSS explained in its annotation that “leaven is a metaphor. Hypocritical, false teachings affect one's mind like leaven works through the dough imperceptibly”. Interestingly, the explanation of Jesus as jiuzhu/saviour is self-defeating to both the BFBS and the NBSS, since they claimed that their explanatory readings were not interpretative. When equating Jesus with saviour, the BFBS not only dealt with a ‘translation problem’ but also gave its interpretation of the name ‘Jesus’, because Ιησοῦς (Iēsous), the Greek word for ‘Jesus’, is derived from the Hebrew name עושי (yēšûăʿ), a later form of עושוהי (yĕhôšûaʿ) or עשוהי (yĕhôšuaʿ), which means ‘the Lord is salvation’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ It was not problematic only because such an interpretation was commonly accepted by Protestant denominations.

The BFBS used cross-references widely for its Chinese translational helps for Matthew. More than one-third, i.e. thirty-five, of the ninety-three translational helps examined include this kind of reference. Also, more than two thirds, i.e. twenty-four, of these thirty-five translational helps are something like the explanation of the term ‘leaven’ in 16:6: Only the chapter and verse numbers of the related biblical reference are provided in the translational help. In contrast, the NBSS's Chinese annotations on Matthew do not include any reference to the text of Matthew. Indeed, it seems that the NBSS avoided cross-referencing if possible. Out of the NBSS's two hundred and twenty-two Chinese annotations on Matthew, only ten make reference to the text of the Old Testament and one refers to the text of the New Testament. Besides, only the one explaining the phrase ‘an eye for an eye’ in 5:38 contains nothing more than the book title together with the chapter and verse numbers of the related biblical verse, i.e. Exodus 21:24.

Some infelicities of the BFBS's translational helps would make us suspicious of whether the BFBS treated the matter seriously. When explaining the term ‘Beezelbub’ in 10:25, the BFBS referred to it as the name of guiwang 鬼王 (the king of ghosts). Such an explanation is nothing but superfluous, as it simply repeated the note on ‘Beezelbub’ provided by the translators of the Mandarin Union Version and printed in the main text. Whereas the NBSS gave the approximate direct distance in li 里 (Chinese mile) between Chaldea and Judea in its annotation on Babylon for 1:11, the BFBS's translational help tells that Babylon was several thousand li east of Judea.

From the perspective of cultural mediation, the BFBS's translational helps remain at the stage of introducing biblical cultures to Chinese Bible readers, while the NBSS's annotations show that the NBSS saw the need for explanations of the biblical text with reference to other religions in China and those dealing with the conflicts between biblical and Confucian teachings. The BFBS's translational helps indeed provide some explanations of Jewish customs that might be strange to the Chinese, such as pouring ointment upon one's head as a way to show honour to a guest (26:7), and pouring ointment upon one's body as a practice relating to someone's burial (26:12). Nevertheless, they are only explanations of what particular customs or practices mean in Jewish culture. By contrast, the NBSS paid attention to Chinese religious ideas when explaining peculiarities. As shown in its explanation of the idea of resurrection in 22:23, the NBSS's annotation specially points out that it is different from the Buddhist belief in transmigration of souls and rebirth. This would help the Chinese avoid mixing up the concepts of Protestantism and Buddhism, since long before the arrival of Protestantism in China, Buddhist teachings had been integrated into Chinese culture and regarded as part of Chinese religious thoughts. Nineteenth-century Protestant missionary writings in Chinese often include discussions about the Buddhist belief in transmigration of souls and rebirth. For example, William C. Burns, who was a missionary of the English Presbyterian Mission, added his own comment on the conflict between the Protestant and Buddhist concepts of soul to his Mandarin translation of F. L. Mortimer's The Peep of Day, which was a widely circulated Chinese Protestant text in late Qing China.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Besides, as shown in its annotations on 8:22, 10:37 and 12:48, the NBSS tried to mediate the conflicts between Jesus’ teachings and the concept of filial piety. In these verses, either the saying or action of Jesus was liable to give the Chinese an impression that Protestantism was a religion teaching people to disregard their parents. Hence, the NBSS explained that serving and worshipping God and filial piety are not mutually exclusive, although the former is more important than the latter.

Where the BFBS placed its translational helps also deserves our attention. Whereas the NBSS followed the Chinese practice of placing annotations in small characters within the text,Footnote ¹¹¹ the BFBS placed its translational helps in the margin above the text. By separating the translational helps completely from the text, the BFBS showed Chinese Bible readers that its translational helps do not belong to the sacred text.Footnote ¹¹² The BFBS introduced here a clear categorical distinction between sacred and supplemental writings.Footnote ¹¹³ Placing translational helps outside the biblical text could convey the idea that only the biblical text itself enjoys sacredness. Moreover, this was a convenient way to introduce translational helps into the Chinese Bible, since in order to do so the BFBS did not have to adjust its existing printing plates extensively.Footnote ¹¹⁴