The curious history of the Pyongyang Bible
SOUTH KOREA — When Christians in North Korea published their own Bible in 1984, they surprised their neighbours in the south: how could this be achieved in a communist country that had been completely closed to the world for nearly three decades, and where there were no local churches or Bible scholars? Certainly, Dr Young-Jin Min, who at the time was Professor at the Methodist Theological Seminary in Seoul, and is now General Secretary of the Korean Bible Society, was intrigued when he heard about the translation. Tension“In the early 1980s, there was still a great deal of tension between North and South Korea and information did not flow easily between the two countries,” he explains. “When news about this new Bible came out, our Korean CIA in Seoul was deeply suspicious. But when I got hold of a copy about a year later, I saw that it was a very faithful revision of our Korean Common Language Bible that we first published in 1977. The North Korean Christians had revised it, not according to their own ideology but to their own North Korean grammar. It was very obvious to me that those who had done the work loved the Bible very much and were faithful believers. “In fact, at that time we in South Korea had not revised the 1977 version, which had many errors, so the North Korean version was better, because they had corrected them!” Dr Min, himself a Bible translation expert, was curious about who had carried out the revision work. As far as he knew, there were no trained Bible translators in North Korea. High quality work“I was aware that there were about 500 house churches in Pyongyang, but I was surprised that there was someone who was capable of such high quality Bible revision work,” he says. “It was only in the early 1980s that the North Korean government started to officially recognise Christianity and allow the building of churches, of which there are now three in Pyongyang – two Protestant and one Roman Catholic. Even now there is only one seminary, which accepts 10 students every three years. Identity“So I was very interested to find out the identity of this person but it was only 10 years later, at a meeting in Tokyo, that I was able to speak to North Korean church delegates. They were not able to tell me who this man was, however.
“For the next 10 years, whenever I met North Korean representatives at international meetings, I would ask about the reviser of the Pyongyang Bible. Two years ago I finally found out from the Rev Young-Sop Kang, the Chairman of the Korean Christian Federation, which represents the Protestant Church in North Korea. He said that it was a man called Young-Tae Lee who was in his 70s when he did the revision work. He had since died. “When Mr Lee was a young man he had assisted William Reynolds, a Presbyterian missionary from the USA, with the revision of the Korean Bible in the 1930s. So he was the perfect person, in fact probably the only person, to carry out the revision work for the Pyongyang Bible. I was happy that I finally had my answer!” WarningsBut Dr Min wanted to know more about
Mr Lee – his family background and how he had become a Christian.
So he did some research. “All on board were killed in the ensuing battle, including the first Protestant missionary from the British Congregation Church to Korea – a young man called Robert Thomas. He had managed to get to shore, holding a copy of the Chinese Bible, which he gave to one of the Korean soldiers before he died. It was forbidden to take a foreign book, but the soldier put it in his pocket and took it to his house, where he lived with his large family. “Some accounts say that he put it on a shelf and forgot about it, while others say that he used the pages of the Bible to decorate the walls in his guest house and that people came from far and wide to read the walls. This account states that the man became a Christian. Descendant
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