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‘Scripture Extracts’: An Early Catholic Burmese Translation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 April 2024
Abstract
Roman Catholic missions preceded Protestant missions in Burma by three hundred years. Scripture extracts is the only known extant Burmese translation of portions of the Bible by the earlier Catholic missionaries. Produced by the Italian Barnabite missionary Guiseppe d'Amato, Scripture extracts represents the Catholic missionary strategy of inculturation. It was printed by the British Baptist missionaries to Burma, Felix Carey and James Chater, in Serampore in 1811, and passed on to the American Baptist missionary Adoniram Judson. Scripture extracts was an important resource for Judson's translation of the entire Bible into Burmese, although he employed a different translation approach.
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Footnotes
My thanks to Zin Mar Myo Swe for her help in analysing the Burmese text of Scripture extracts, and to Rebecca Shuttleworth and the Angus Library and Archive, Regents Park College, Oxford. The extract from Scripture extracts is reproduced by kind permission of the Angus Library and Archive.
References
1 Giuseppe d'Amato, Scripture extracts, ed. James Chater and Felix Carey, Serampore 1811, Burmese collection, Baptist Mission Society Archive, Regents Park College, Oxford.
2 For this historical treatment I will refer to modern-day Myanmar as it was known in the past, as Burma.
3 For an overview see Robert, Dana L., Christian mission: how Christianity became a world religion, Chichester 2011, 72ff., and Bernard de Vaulx, History of the missions, London 1961, 65ffGoogle Scholar.
4 For example, Joseph Schmidlin devotes one paragraph to the earlier Catholic missions in Burma and half a paragraph to the later one hundred years of the Barnabite mission: Catholic mission history, ed. Matthias Braun, trans. William Hall Robertson and Thomas J. Kennedy, Techny, Il 1933, 309–10, 488.
5 See Jong, John de, ‘Adoniram Judson's Burmese Bible: dependency and development’, Church History xcii/4 (2023), 822–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I discovered Scripture extracts after completing this article but the same concepts of intertextuality apply, i.e., that the author of Scripture extracts was rewriting earlier Burmese Catholic texts in the creation of this new text, rather than starting with a blank slate.
6 McNally, Robert E., ‘The Council of Trent and vernacular Bibles’, Theological Studies xxvii/2 (1966), 204–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Ibid. 226.
8 Ibid. 218.
9 Details of the Catholic missions to Burma can be found in Peter J. Wilkinson, ‘Mission to the Burmese Buddhists: a case-history of the nineteenth-century apostolate of Paul-Ambroise Bigandet, M.E.P’, unpubl. PhD diss. Pontificia Universitas Gregoriana, Rome 1970, 64–106, and Vivian Ba, The early Catholic missionaries in Burma, Rangoon 1964. See also Tun, Aung Myo, ‘Arrival of early Catholic chaplains in Myanmar before Nyaungyan period’, University of Mandalay, Research Journal xi (2020)Google Scholar, <https://meral.edu.mm/records/5598?community=um>, and Shwe, Me Me, ‘History of founding Roman Catholicism in Myanmar’, University of Mandalay, Research Journal xi (2020)Google Scholar, <https://meral.edu.mm/record/5603/files/History%20of%20Founding%20Roman%20Catholicism%20in%20Myanmar.pdf>.
10 Brockey, Liam Matthew, Journey to the east: the Jesuit mission to China, 1579–1724, Cambridge, Ma 2007, 184–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The circumstances in which the Barnabite mission became established in Burma share some similarity with the later American Baptist mission. Adoniram and Ann Judson had planned to start missionary work in Penang but ended up in Burma when they had to sail on the first ship leaving the Madras port to avoid deportation to England by the East Indies Company. The ship was going to Burma. See Francis Wayland, A memoir of the life and labors of the Rev. Adoniram Judson, i, Boston 1853, 114–21.
11 Ba, Early Catholic missionaries, 3–7.
12 Judson, Adoniram, ‘Letter from the Rev. Adoniram Judson, American Baptist Missionary in Burmah, to a minister in London. Rangoon, March 30, 1817’, Baptist Magazine x (1818), 74–5Google Scholar.
13 Percoto, Giovanni Maria, Compendium doctrinae Christianae idiomate Barmano sive Bomano, Rome 1776Google Scholar, and Alphabetum Barmanum seu Bomanum Regni Avae finitimarumque regionum, Rome 1776. See further de Jong, ‘Judson's Burmese Bible’.
14 Ba writes that a copy is in the Propagation of the Faith Library in Rome: Early Catholic missionaries, 8.
15 Shorter, Aylward, Towards a theology of inculturation, New York 1988, 152–63Google Scholar.
16 Brockey, Journey to the East, 185.
17 ‘Memoir of Guiseppe D'Amato, missionary in Ava. (Extract of a private letter from Major H. Burney, resident at the Burmese court, dated Ava, 9th April 1832)’, Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British and Foreign India, China, and Australasia, n.s. x (Jan.–Apr. 1883), 274–6 at p. 275. Ba, Early Catholic missionaries, 37, found Burney's quotation in the Annali della Propagazione della Fede vii (1841), 344. Ba's rendition, however, is not accurate: ‘This holy man is like a God, why should we harm him?’ Perhaps the quotation had been translated into Italian and Ba was re-translating. The original meaning of the statement is probably more like, ‘He is like a (Buddhist) monk/holy man, why should we molest him?’
18 For background on the British Baptist mission to Burma see de Jong, ‘Judson's Burmese Bible’.
19 Chater, James, ‘Letter from Mr. Chater and Mr. Felix Carey, Rangoon, July 31st, 1809’, Baptist Magazine ii (1810), 584–6Google Scholar. Ava was the Burmese royal city at the time.
20 Chater, James, ‘Letter from Mr. Chater, missionary to the Burman Empire to Mr. I – – of London. Prince of Wales’ Island, 4th July, 1811’, Baptist Magazine iv (1812), 225–6Google Scholar.
21 William Ward was one of the ‘Serampore Trio’, along with William Carey and Joshua Marshman, the founding British Baptist missionaries in India. It appears that Ward had a close relationship with Felix Carey, and the year of the inscription is significant, as it was in 1818 that Ward met with Carey in Chittagong and persuaded him to return to Serampore from his self-imposed exile. See Hall, D. G. E., ‘Felix Carey’, Journal of Religion xii/4 (1932), 491Google Scholar.
22 John Barton, The Word: on the translation of the Bible, London 2022, chs ii–iii. Barton (p. 30) derives his categories from Schleiermacher: ‘Either the translator leaves the writer as far as possible in peace, and moves the reader towards him; or else he leaves the reader as far as possible in peace, and moves the writer towards him.’
23 So Lawrence Venuti, The translator's invisibility, 2nd edn, Abingdon 2008, 16–17.
24 See de Jong, John, ‘A nineteenth-century New England exegete abroad: Adoniram Judson and the Burmese Bible’, Harvard Theological Review cxii/3 (2019), 319–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 Judson associates the Catholic missionaries with the Burmese Catholic communities which had descended from the early Portuguese migrants.
26 Adoniram Judson, ‘Letter from Mr. Judson to Mr. Ward, Rangoon, Jan. 18, 1816’, American Baptist Magazine and Missionary Intelligencer n.s. i (1817), 28–9.
27 Published in Serampore in 1812, and lightly revised in 1815, attributed to Chater. See de Jong, ‘Judson's Burmese Bible’.
28 For an analysis of why Judson disliked Chater and Carey's translation see Jong, John de, ‘“I have nothing yet that I can venture to use”: Adoniram Judson's rejection of James Chater's Gospel of Matthew in Burmese’, The Bible Translator lxxiv/2 (2023), 284–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
29 Hebrew רָקִ֖יעַ; Burmese moe-myet-na-kyet.
30 The use of Burmese honorific language, which derives from Burmese culture, is a fraught topic for modern Burmese translations of the Bible, which are mainly read by non-Burmese ethnic minority speakers of Burmese: de Jong, ‘“Nothing yet that I can venture to use”’, 294 and references there.
31 Sanneh, Lamin, Translating the message: the missionary impact on culture, 2nd edn, New York 2009, 4Google Scholar.
32 Ibid.