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4. Funded Research Projects

Republican China. The proposed research will offer an opportunity to understand

that the China experience of the Protestant mission not only involved the Christian
Bible’s eastward cross-cultural journey but also challenged the traditional
Western understanding of Christian beliefs.

The first part of the proposed research is a study focusing on the controversy
over the ‘annotation question’ between Protestant missionaries in China and Bible
societies during the 1870s and the 1910s. By critically examining archival

sources and relevant published materials, the study will probe into the challenge
posed by the missionary experience in China to the traditional Western

understanding of Christian beliefs and the doctrinal issues central to the debate
over the necessity of annotations for the Chinese Protestant Bible. The study will

then elucidate the views of Protestant missionaries and Bible societies on the
value, necessity and scope of annotations for the Chinese Protestant Bible and

the kinds of ideological positions taken by the two parties to support their views.
In addition, the study will look at the power relationship between the two parties
in the mission context and how much this weighed in Bible societies’ decisions to

consider deviating from their long-established ‘without note or comment’ principle
for the sake of the China mission field.

The second part consists of textual analyses of the draft annotations compiled

by Protestant missionaries in China and the annotations eventually printed in
Chinese Bibles by Bible societies. Particular attention will be given to the

annotators’ strategies to explain the biblical world to Chinese readers with
reference to their socio-cultural context. The annotation practices adopted by
Protestant missionaries and native Chinese writers will also be compared to cast

light on whether and how missionary Bible annotators followed local textual
practices to facilitate the Chinese reception of Christianity.

Through an archive-based, well-researched study of an overlooked aspect of

the Chinese Protestant Bible in late Qing and early Republican China, this
research will further our historical knowledge of Chinese Bible translation and

publishing, and also enhance our understanding of the complexity of the
historical process by which Christianity was spread in the non-Christian world.

HONG KONG BAPTIST UNIVERSITY | David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies 56