Between 1750 and 1850, at least twenty versions of the Greenlandic Bible were published through the efforts of Greenlandic catechists, Danish Lutherans, German Moravians, the Danish Bible Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS). This article assesses the role of Greenlandic and other Inuit translators as they were engaged in the colonial project of devising a complete version of the scriptures in their own language. Using the relatively untapped correspondence of the BFBS, it considers how and why the status of Inuit translators changed over the course of the missionary translation project. In one response to the reception of new Bibles, Inuit people offered gifts of blubber to the BFBS to support translations for other mission communities. To understand the meaning of this exchange, this essay brings together the methodologies and perspectives of missionary linguistics. It uncovers the unique role played by Greenlandic and other Inuit translators and catechists, foregrounding their contribution to a successful national project, the creation of a national language for independent Greenland and the emergence of literate Christian communities. By reading along and against the grain of colonial archives, it seeks to recover something of the names and motivation of Inuit scripture translators.

Adoniram Judson is widely perceived as the pioneer Bible translator in Burma. His translation of the entire Bible into Burmese, however, built upon three centuries of Roman Catholic missionary outreach. Catholic priests had arrived as chaplains for Portuguese immigrants to Burma in the early sixteenth century, but an indigenous Burmese Catholic church was established within a generation through intermarriage. Barnabite missionaries arrived in the early eighteenth century and engaged in a dynamic hundred years of missionary work. These Catholic missionaries developed key Christian terminology and discourse that Judson drew upon in his translation work. British Baptists were also in Burma for several years before Judson arrived and made their own contribution to Burmese Bible translation. An analysis of the Burmese translations of the Lord's Prayer by Barnabite missionary Giovanni Maria Percoto (1776), British Baptist James Chater (1812), and Judson (1817 and 1832) demonstrates how Judson both drew upon and developed the work of his predecessors in his immense project of translating the entire Bible into Burmese (1840). The Judson Bible, still the most widely used and highly esteemed version in modern-day Myanmar, is an intertextual production. Literary and oral texts, all shaped by their historical settings, intersected multiple other texts over a period of three hundred years before flowing into Judson's translation.

This article examines two different missionary areas where the Society of Jesus was sent to evangelise the native population: the Andean territories previously under Inca domination and the remote Mariana Islands in the Pacific Rim. The gathering of “other barbarians” living outside “civilised” societies was a tool of early modern colonisers within Europe and beyond. The English did so in sixteenth-century Ireland and the Spanish began reducing the so-called American Indians to new settlements in New Spain and Peru. In this paper, I want to compare the methods used to concentrate the natives of the Viceroyalty of Peru, where the Jesuits actively collaborated, with the borderland mission of the Marianas, where the Jesuits worked as parishioners of a much less sophisticated people: the CHamoru.1 As I will demonstrate, this policy of gathering souls was not an isolated one, but part and parcel of a universalistic principle of spreading God's word that was irremediably embedded in colonial structures of coercion and political control in the Americas and Asia-Pacific.

This article offers a framework for historical analysis of the goals of Protestant missionary projects. ‘Conversion’ in Protestantism is not clearly defined, is liable to be falsified and may (in some missionary views) require preparatory work of various kinds before it can be attempted. For these reasons, Protestant missionaries have adopted a variety of intermediate and proxy goals for their work, goals which it is argued can be organised onto four axes: orthodoxy, zeal, civilisation and morality. Together these form a matrix which missionaries, their would-be converts and their sponsors have tried to negotiate. In different historical contexts, missionaries have chosen different combinations of priorities, and have adapted these in the face of experience. The article suggests how various historical missionary projects can be analysed using this matrix and concludes by suggesting some problems and issues in the history of Protestant missions which such analysis can illuminate.

This paper investigates the long-term impact of historical missionary activity on HIV in sub-Saharan Africa. On the one hand, missionaries were the first to invest in modern medicine in the region. On the other hand, Christianity influenced sexual beliefs and behaviors that affect the risk of contagion. We build a new geocoded dataset locating Protestant and Catholic missions in the early 20th century, as well as the health facilities they invested in, that we combine with individual-level Demographic and Health Survey data. With these data, we can address separately these two channels, within regions close to historical missionary settlements. First, we show that proximity to historical missionary health facilities decreases the likelihood of HIV; persistence in healthcare provision and safer sexual behaviors in the region explain this result. Second, we show that regions close to historical missionary settlements exhibit higher likelihood of HIV. This effect is driven by the Christian population in our sample. This suggests conversion to Christianity as a possible explanatory channel. Our findings are robust to alternative specifications addressing selection.