The Commodore and the Church

Recently the Fiji Government has announced the lifting of the Public Emergency Decree controlling the media and the holding of meetings including Methodist Church gatherings outside of Sunday worship. This included of course the quite extraordinary cancellation of the Bose ko Viti from 2009 - 2011.
What terrifies the government is the likely elevation of Tuikilakila Waqairatu to the position of Qase Levu.
The new Public Order Act, which replaces the PER does little to give comfort to the Methodist Church. They still require police permission for many of their meetings and they have little certainty that the Conference of 2012 and the Choir Competition will be allowed to go ahead.
It really is a test of the genuineness of this government in preparing for elections in 2014, to now see if the Church is permitted to resume its normal freedom of operation and go about its work without the degree of state/military interference that has been happening for more than three years

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".

Church State Crisis

In all its 174 year history, the Methodist Church has never failed to meet as a Conference. This is a major gathering that stands at the centre of church life and organisation. It appears now, in 2009, that the Conference tradition is to be broken by the strong-armed tactics of the current military ruler. The claimed sticking point is the failure of the Methodist Church leadership to do the regime's bidding and dismiss Revs Kanailagi and Lasaro for alleged "political" comments ; failing that the Methodist Conference would be banned. Quite correctly, the Qase Levu, Ame Tugaue, the GS Tuikilakila and the Assoc GS, Tevita Banivanua - all well-educated, moderate and respected men - replied that ministers cannot be dismissed at the will of any particular individual or administration but that certain processes, involving fairness and justice, must be followed. Yet the army gave the church one hour to act on its demand! The Methodists must stand together in solidarity and seek the religious freedoms that they are entitled to from any reasonable secular dispensation.

Kalougata and Bible Translation

I have recently been involved in correspondence with the Editor of the Fiji Daily Post. He asked me to write a brief article on the history of the Fijian word "kalougata" and its use by the earliest Bible translators. My article was subsequently picked up by the widely read and very interesting Blogsite "Babasiga" and an interesting discussion followed.

The wider context of this "Kalougata" debate is that the Fijian citizen James Ah Koy is financing a new Fijian translation of the Bible in which the word 'kalougata' (blessing) has been deleted. Ah Koy believes that the word is a curse but he has a very narrow understanding of the meaning and background of the word; I tried to point this out in my article.

The problem with Ah Koy's efforts, no matter how well intentioned, is that his translators are translating from English, not from the original biblical languages of Hebrew and Greek. This will inevitably result in an inferior translation.

The first translators of Scripture into Fijian were very fine scholars, John Hunt with the New Testament and David Hazlewood with the Old Testament. Hunt translated from Greek into Fijian and Hazlewood from Hebrew into Fijian. The sad fact is that later revsions of their work, by men like James Calvert and Frederick Langham, simply let to a poorer standard of translation. This is why I am currently involved in a project to see both the Hunt New Testament, firstly, and then the Hazlewood Old Testament, reprinted to make them more widely available, NOT to replace our current version, but to complement them and give greater depth and understanding in the reading of the Fijian scriptures.

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.

Publication Developments

For those who are interested, two of my books on early Fiji Methodism have just been published on Google Books. I think that this development is the result of the publisher, Institute of Pacific Studies(IPS) at the USP, being closed down in its current form. Since IPS owns copyright on its books, it has probably given permission for Google Books to publish the books in their entirety. As a result you can find the whole content of The Inheritance of Hope and Exodus of the I Taukei, both the English text and Fijian translation.