1864 to 2014: The First Fijian Old Testament

150 years after its first appearance in Fiji, the original translation of the Fijian Old Testament was republished at the 2014 Methodist Conference.
The genesis of this project began following the republication of John Hunt's 1847 translation of the New Testament, which was launched on Viwa on the 200th anniversary of Hunt's birth - June 13 2012.
At the Conference that year, Rev Dr Tuikilakila Waqairatu was elected President. He was an Old Testament scholar and became very interested in some excerpts of David Hazlewood's Fijian Old Testament which I passed on to him at the beginning of 2013. An existing copy of the 1864 Bible had gone missing while on transferral from the Fiji Museum to the National Archives. (Let us hope that it will be found eventually; it belonged to Sir Allport Barker, a former colonial official who bequeathed his considerable personal library to the Fiji during its days as a colony.)I managed to track down a clean copy of Hazlewood's translation in the Mitchell Library, Sydney.
It is not the occasion to go into the considerable history behind the writing of this remarkable piece of Fijian literature. Suffice to say that Hazlewood's manuscript, completed in NSW a few months before his death in 1855, was picked up by James Calvert, en route to England for leave. There the manuscript was "revised" by Calvert, Joseph Waterhouse (also on leave) and a Bible Society editor named Mellor. It appears, thankfully, that they did not make extensive changes to Hazlewood's script (that was done 40 years later by Frederick Langham). So it was that in 1864, the Bible Society printed and published Hazlewood's translation.
Like Hunt's translation, that of Hazlewood did not survive the passage of time, which has been the reason for the republication of the two foundational Fijian Scriptures.
My gratitude is due to President Waqairatu for supporting this OT project which was way beyond my capacity to finance. A digital copy of the book was sent to China - Nanking, where 80% of the world's bibles are printed - and right on cue the finished result arrived in Fiji one week before Conference was due to meet at the end of August. The Chinese did a fantastic job - hard cover, sewn binding, B5 size with a clear copy of the original. Interim President Ratabacaca launched the Old Testament and sales were hot through Conference week.
I am not a Fijian linguist but my good friend Talatala Peni Cabenalevu tells me that there is something very special about this first translation. Like Hunt, Hazlewood had a good grasp of idiomatic Fijian (and add to that everyday Fijian as well). So the prose of this 1864 edition is probably easier to understand than Langham's "standard" Fijian Bible which was written with chiefly language coming out of Langham's 30 years residence on Bau.
And here are the words of Fijian scholar in Sydney to whom I gave a copy of the book. This is what she said:
"I have read some of the psalms and looked a little at ecclesiastes this morning. You are very right in pointing out the difference in language. Hazlewood's translation is more organic to the nature and perhaps theology of Fiji. I myself am not particularly fluent in my language, but I see the spirit of the words which he uses to express or name things in the Fijian vernacular. I find it to be a good representation of the poetical fluidity of Fijian expression".
In summary, as I told the Methodist Conference, Fijian now have access to three contrasting translations of the Bible: firstly the foundational texts of Hazlewood and Hunt which will forever(because of their faithfulness to the original languages) form the reference point for later revisions and translations; secondly the Langham revision of 1901, which became standard because there were no other versions for 80 years and thirdly the very recent Bible Society translation which I mentioned in an earlier blog and which tries to do what the Good New Bible did for English.
Now we await the scholarly study of the various forms of Fijian language and idiom used in these three translations, stretching across more than 160 years.

Top: An open Hazlewood republished Old Testament. Below: The Hazlewood and Hunt republished Scriptures.

To the Glory of Whom?

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.

Cancellation of Fiji Methodist Conference 2009

Under huge and targetted pressure from the Interim Regime led by Commodore Bainimarama, the Methodist Church of Fiji and Rotuma has cancelled this year's Conference. Whatever the circumstances that may justify a decision, those responsible for it should understand the consequences of their actions. When the Conference was held up in 1987 because of the Coup events then, that decision was made by the Church unilaterally. This time, the Church has bowed to secular authorities some of whom are taking great satisfaction from their persecution and building new religious followings of their own, the genuinenes of which has to be questioned.

The key principle in this whole affair was set down a long time ago, in 1839, by the celebrated missionary John Hunt. When faced with the determination of a high chief (the secular authority)to alter decisions taken at the Annual Meeting of the missionaries [known then as the District Meeting but today as the Bose Ko Viti], John Hunt stated quite categorically that the deliberations and decisions of the Bose Ko Viti came under the direct ordinance of God and as such could not be changed because of providential "interference" as he called it in those very church decisions. This is the principle that has been compromised by today's Methodist Church.

This was the time when they had to take the harder road - to say, in an adaptation of Martin Luther's words: "Here We Stand, we can do no other".

2009: Launch of Next Part of 1847 Fijian New Testament

Welcome to the new year - 2009. A very important Fiji Methodist Conference will be held this year at Rewa. It was here in 1839 that the Methodists started a mission station, staffed by Thomas Jaggar. He was both an ordained minister and a printer. He came to Rewa with his family, bringing with him also a rudimentary Printing Press which was immediately put to work, printing catechisms, hymn sheets, school work books and segments of scripture

Thomas Jaggar was also a scholar of the Fijian language and he translated the Gospel of John. He sent it to his colleague at Viwa, the now celebrated John Hunt, who was working on a full translation of the New Testament into Fijian. Hunt accepted Jaggar's translation of John's Gospel and it was the only book in the 1847 NT not translated by Hunt.

At the Rewa Conference, three of the books of the 1847 NT will be re-published: Luke, John and Acts. This follows the publication of the books of Matthew and Mark in 2005 (see illustration).

It is significant that the fine work of Jaggar will be recognised at the place where he first carried out his printing, translating and mission work.