The Chinese Translation Of The New Testament Of The Basset And Xu Version

It’s been a long time since the Bible was first translated in China, accompanied with the entering of Christianity to China in different periods. Specific to the Catholic Church, the religious missionaries came to China and started to translate in a quite early time. They had a long history for the Bible translation while those translations were of great value, also quite controversial. Jean Basset and Jean Xu’s joint translation "Bible" of the New Testament, is the earliest known "Bible" of Chinese translation in this field, occupies a unique position in the nexus of academic research and all the other relevant studies cannot avoid it. However, it’s rare to see many studies about the Bible of this version. It is usually just as generations Bible Translation Studies section of the small prelude to appear. This suggests that the Basset and Xu’s Version in academia has not received due attention, need a great effort to dig into the text itself, to realize their intrinsic value.In Early Qing,Jean Basset came to China as a member of Missionary Overseas from Paris (M.E.P.). During the18years’living in China, he experienced the "Rites Controversy" of Chinese and Western cultures colliding constantly and reflected on the spread of the Gospel in China to explore the road, and also had to be careful of the inter-factional fighting religiousgroups between different religious orders. Under the squeeze of multiple difficulties, with great religious fervor, he translated the Bible. In the " Bible " Translation history, for the first time, he translated systematically Latin " Bible " of the " four Gospels"," Acts","Paul’s Epistles " into Chinese, and left two different versions. Recently, I have4different copies of the entire transcripts at hand. Basset and Xu’s version of the Bible translation of the New Testament only involves with the1st chapter of Hebrew Bible, due to Basset’s premature death. Butits content, the writing style, and the atmosphere was injected in the Protestant Bible afterwards, which has a great influence to the translation and publishing of Morrison and Mashmani’s versions of Chinese Bible.In1704, Basset baptized a fameless literari Jean Xu. Afterwards, Xu became a great help for his translating the Bible. As a token of respect and affirmation of Xu’s work, this paper will consider their translation as "Basset and Xu’s version". Actually, the study about Xu is also a topic deserves more concern. Basset only lived for45years, butlived in the time of two reputated Emperors Kangxi and Louis XIV in China and West. And the church he stayed was also in the beginning of the religious grassroots to naturalize Asian and African pagans as their mission, was afaithful spokesperson and policy makers for the Roman authorities in these areas. In1659, the vaticariting systemfirst set up by the church, and two Vicariates were set up in China. The one that was responsible for two areas was Francois Pallu, the founder of M.E.P.. Charles Maigrot, Apostolic Vicar of Fujian, who caused the "Rites Controversy", and the special envoy Carlo Tommaso Maillard de Tournon, were both missinaries in M.E.P..From this perspective, although the Pope once had given the rights of Bible translation to Jesuit missionaries but also banned it in China. However, if Basset could finish his translation by more time, under historical conditions, China’s first official publication of the Bible translation might be earlier for one hundred years.The innovation of this paper lies in:through the comparison of the Latin Bible in17-18Century’s Europe and the British Library version of Basset and Xu’s version of the Bible, it assures that he used Tetramonon Evangeliorumcollectum8:adunatum,8°. Pariliis as a basis for translation, which solves the problem of whether it’s by Basset when he was still alive or by Xu after Basset died; and then finds that he translated the Rome version earlier than the British Library version; also, after comparison of Basset and Xu’s version with other Catholic missionaries’translations, the historical inherence of the Christianity becomes clear; furthermore, after comparison of Basset and Xu’s verson with Morrison and Mashman’s versions, it concludes that their versions were all from Basset and Xu’s, therefore, the change from the Christianity to the Protestant Christianity in the Bible’s translation is cleared up and the evolution of the terms and the nouns is also shown up by qualititative analysis in this paper.