It is some time since I added a blog to this site but thank you to my loyal friends who keep checking up from time to time. It is January 2012, the year in which we remember the birth of Rev. John Hunt(1812), who with his wife Hannah came to Fiji from Lincolnshire and spent nine valuable years in establishing Christianity in Fiji. It was a delight to trace direct descendants of John and Hannah Hunt, through their eldest daughter Eliza; their are a number of families and they live in the United States of America, very aware of their missionary heritage.
Since completing my trilogy on early Wesleyan History in Fiji, I have become absorbed in a project that involves the republication of the first Fijian New Testament, which was translated by Hunt while at Viwa - directly from Greek to Fijian. One thousand copies were printed on Viwa, itself an amazing achievement by the missionary printer Thomas Jaggar.
Hunt knew he was dying in 1848 and he requested his missionary colleague, James Calvert, to arrange for the Bible Society in England to print a further edition of 10,000 copies of the NT, with corrections to the Viwa edition that Hunt gave to Calvert. Calvert had other ideas. There is too much about this story to go into detail at this point (I'll be presenting a seminar on this at USP in May of 2012). The short account is that Calvert's towering and less than likeable personal ambition would not allow him to let Hunt's idiomatic translation receive the approval of the Bible Society and thereby become enshrined as the normative New Testament in Fijian. No, to the contrary, Calvert spent the next 15 years, until the early 1860s, mutilating Hunt's translation and producing a new edition that put paid to the original beautiful language that Hunt had laboured to produce.
Thus is something the Fijians are going to find very hard to accept: that thei current New Testament is a very inferior version, produced by a man determined at almost any cost to secure a legacy in print.
Since completing my trilogy on early Wesleyan History in Fiji, I have become absorbed in a project that involves the republication of the first Fijian New Testament, which was translated by Hunt while at Viwa - directly from Greek to Fijian. One thousand copies were printed on Viwa, itself an amazing achievement by the missionary printer Thomas Jaggar.
Hunt knew he was dying in 1848 and he requested his missionary colleague, James Calvert, to arrange for the Bible Society in England to print a further edition of 10,000 copies of the NT, with corrections to the Viwa edition that Hunt gave to Calvert. Calvert had other ideas. There is too much about this story to go into detail at this point (I'll be presenting a seminar on this at USP in May of 2012). The short account is that Calvert's towering and less than likeable personal ambition would not allow him to let Hunt's idiomatic translation receive the approval of the Bible Society and thereby become enshrined as the normative New Testament in Fijian. No, to the contrary, Calvert spent the next 15 years, until the early 1860s, mutilating Hunt's translation and producing a new edition that put paid to the original beautiful language that Hunt had laboured to produce.
Thus is something the Fijians are going to find very hard to accept: that thei current New Testament is a very inferior version, produced by a man determined at almost any cost to secure a legacy in print.
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