MAORI BIBLE

Press, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 25253, 4 August 1947, Page 6

MAORI BIBLE

WORK OF REVISION COMMITTEE

For the third time since the Bible appeared in the Maori language, a committee was at work purifying the text and perfecting the iaiom, said the Very Rev. J. G. Laughton, chairman of the Maori Bible Revision Committee, in a broadcast address last evening. Mr Laughton, who is superintendent of the Presbyterian Maori Missions, said that the present revision was being carried out under the supervision of the British end Foreign Bible Society. For revising, the Bible was divided into sections and thoroughly proof-read twice by a panel of 10 outstanding Maori scholars. In March, 1946, a conference of representative scholars met to review their corrections, and to determine the question of the proposed amendments and the general form of the new volume. The reports of the proof-readers raised the question of whether something far more extensive than the mere correction of typographical errors was not called for. Fully realising how great an undertaking it was applying itself to, the conference decided that a full revision of the whole Maori Bible should be made before the next publication, and appointed a revision committee.

In the intervening months, the committee had worked steadily at the task of revision. Mr Laughton continued. The revision of the New Testament had been completed, and at the session which had just ended at Wellington, the committee had been engaged on the revision of the books of Genesis and Psalms in the Old Testament.

“Perhaps the most interesting feature of this whole movement to revise the Maori Bible is the deep interest which Maori people everywhere have taken in it,” Mr Laughton said. “Not only are they subscribing funds, but they are keenly interested in the work which the comir.lttee is doing. No edition of the Maori Bible since the first has been looked forward to with such eagerness as the one at present being prepared. In a new sense, it will be I the Maori Bible. “Some of the funds subscribed have come from groups of Sunday schools and public school children. The members of the committee are working for the generation which these children represent. The new Maori Bible, which is the product of more than a century of scholarship, will bring them, and the generations after them, the Holy Scriptures in their mother tongue.”