SCHERESCHEWSKY, Samuel Isaac Joseph (trans.).

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Jiu yue quan shu ("The Old Testament, Translated into Mandarin Chinese"). First edition of a sinological milestone: the first translation of the Old Testament into northern colloquial "Mandarin" Chinese, the language spoken by most potential Chinese converts. Schereschewsky was also the first sinologist to translate directly from the Hebrew masoretic text and his efforts formed the basis of the 1919 Union Bible, the most widely used Bible among Chinese Protestants in the 20th century.Born to Jewish parents in Russian Lithuania, Schereschewsky (1831-1906) converted to Christianity the early 1850s. After studying for a time in New York, in 1857 he volunteered for missionary work in China, arriving in 1860. In 1862, he accepted a position as an interpreter to Anson Burlingame and devoted himself to textual translation, spending the next 14 years working on this translation, his greatest accomplishment. While earlier missionaries had produced versions of the Bible in classical Chinese and minor southern dialects, Schereschewsky's was the first to make the Old Testament accessible to the country's biggest language group.After completing the mammoth project, Schereschewsky returned to New York with his family, where he was elected Bishop of China. Back in China in the late 1870s, he founded St John's College in Shanghai, and his skills as a translator excited comment for decades to come. Evaluating Schereschewsky's contributions to the missionary cause in the 1890s, his contemporar

Found via Rare Books Intel, a search across rare-book dealers, auction houses and marketplaces worldwide.