Lumen: The first publication
and the first translation of the Korean Anglican mission
A PDF file of the entire
volume of Lumen in English (with a dedication signed by
Bishop Corfe) can be viewed by clicking here
In the Biography
of Bishop Corfe we read:
Corfe and his colleagues devoted themselves unsparingly to the
study of the language throughout the first three or four years.
Till they could publish something, or speak to Coreans, their
foundations would not be laid. Their first effort consisted in the
preparation of a "Tract," and truly admirable it was in its
conception. They wished to give a careful answer to the question,
"What is the Faith you preach?" "By what authority do you do these
things?" They feared lest their insufficient knowledge of the
languages might lead astray those who were being instructed, "Lumen"--the
first word of "A Light to Lighten the Gentiles"--gives a concise
history of the life of our Lord in Scripture language and in 400
verses. The preface is the speech of St. Paul at Athens, and there
is a summing-up at the end in words from the Epistles.
It is excellent for use, whether at home or abroad, and was
published by S.P.C.K, in the English edition. Corfe
presented a copy to all the Bishops at the Lambeth Conference of
1897; the Bishop of Chota Nagpur had it translated into Hindi.
In 1890 the Mission had no Prayer Book or Catechism in Corean, nor
even an adequate translation of the Bible, the available portions
of it were considered unsatisfactory even by the translators at
that date. Lumen was printed by the Mission Press in two
languages, in Chinese and in En-Moun, the alphabetical script used
in Corea, except by the educated. The whole Mission staff was
engaged in this task, Corfe himself spending all available time on
it. And here it is only right to set forth the true state of the
case regarding Bishop Corfe's linguistic difficulties. His failure
was confined to the spoken Corean. He was never able either to
understand colloquial Corean, or to speak it acceptably. But it
was very different with the written language. He gained a good
knowledge of Chinese and of Corean for the purposes of writing and
translations. On February 6, 1893, he writes to (now
Admiral) Richard Webb: "This language is a great difficulty to me.
I know thousands of words, but hardly know how to string them
together; and if I do, I take such a long time about it that the
man is out of sight before I can get my question off."
The
Papers of the Korean Mission, 1889-1987 , in Birmingham University Library include the
following:
XDA24/7/4/5 Lumen ad Revelationem
Gentium 'A Light to Lighten the Gentiles. Being a Tractate
on the Life of Our Blessed Lord in the Words of the Holy Scripture
for Use in the Home and Foreign Mission Field', compiled by the
Missionaries of the Church of England in Corea, London, SPCK,
1898.
XDA24/7/4/6 Lumen ad Revelationem
Gentium 'Being a summary account of the Life, Death,
Resurrection of Our Lord and the Foundation of the Church drawn up
in the words of Holy Scripture in the Chinese and Corean
languages. Compiled and translated by the members of Bishop
Corfe's Mission and printed at the English Church Mission Press in
Seoul'. 3 Copies.
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From: The
Church in Corea By the Right Reverend Mark
Napier Trollope, D.D. London: Mowbray, 1915. Milwaukee: The Young
Churchman, 1915.
Chapter II. English Church Mission to Corea History, 1889-1910
While the members of the Mission were still busy with their study
of the language, the printing-press, presented to Bishop Corfe by
his brother naval chaplains, had been set to work in the Nak Tong
Mission House. As already mentioned, the preliminary work of
starting it in 1891 had been done by Mr. Peake, who had come from
British Columbia in Bishop Corfe's wake. When he went home his
place was taken in 1892 by Mr. J. W. Hodge, who greatly developed
both the work and plant and continued to work as the Mission
printer until 1900. During these eight or nine years the Mission
press had done very useful work at a time when printing-presses in
Corea were very scarce, turning out in creditable fashion such
books of general interest as Mr. James Scott's Corean Manual and
Corean Dictionary, as well as the simple religious works, which
were the first-fruits of the translation efforts of the bishop and
his clergy.
The first and most important of these was a so-called "tract" (it
really was a rather large book) published in 1893, on the Life of
our Blessed Lord, intended to form the basis of our earliest
teaching and preaching, there being as yet no available version of
the Holy Scriptures in the Corean tongue. The book, which went by
the name of Lumen, or Lumen ad Revelationem Gentium (being
the Latin rendering of the Corean title Cho Man Min Kwang)
was printed in alternate paragraphs of Chinese characters and
Corean On-man, or vulgar script; and was composed of ten chapters,
in the words of Holy Scripture, illustrating the Incarnate Life of
the Son of God, from the Annunciation to the Ascension, with S.
Paul's sermon at Athens as preface, and a postscript describing
Pentecost, the Acts of the Apostles, and the foundation of the
Holy Catholic Church.
This served its purpose well until, some years later, and bit by
bit, a translation of the whole New Testament appeared under the
auspices of the British and Foreign Bible Society, in the
production of which members of the Mission took only a small part.
--------------------------
The Korean version of Lumen
죠(조)만민광 照萬民光 JoManMinGwang
A copy (shelfmark 15260.b.2 ) is in the British Museum Handlist
of antiquarian Korean books in the British Library
A copy is in the Bodleian Library Oxford (as mentioned page 22 of
the book by Minh Chung, Korean
Treasures: Rare Books, Manuscripts and Artefacts in the Bodleian
Libraries. . ., illustration p 15, but with no mention of
the title "Lumen").
The Bodleian also owns the only
known copy of a book (attributed to Bishop Corfe in
the 1903 Catalogue
of the Landis Library: RASKB Transactions Volume 3)
: Terminations of the Verb 하다 with occasional references to
some of the terminations used in Lumen. Seoul. 1896. For
private circulation only.
This came to the Bodleian from Richard Rutt. There is no way of
knowing whether this copy is the same as that formerly in the
Landis Library. It is freely available
from the Bodleian as a scanned PDF file.
The Internet offers: a
few color images of a very fine copy of JoManMinGwang
and complete colour images of a
rather damaged copy lacking the title page.
The Academy
of Korean Studies online Library has black
and white scans of the whole text
of JoManMinGwang.
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From An
Early Koreanologist : Eli Barr Landis 1865-1898 by
Richard Rutt RASKB Transactions 54, 1979 :
After Christmas Landis and Corfe went to Seoul for a brief
conference of the mission, and during January. Trollope visited
them at Chemulp’o. Among the subjects they discussed was the
project they called ‘ Lumen.’
This was a plan to translate a catena of gospel passages into
Korean for use until such time as an adequate translation of the
New Testament was made. Corfe called this work Lumen ad
revelationem gentium, ‘a light to lighten the gentiles,’
from the Song of Simeon in Luke 2.32.
This translation work was soon begun. The missionaries did not yet
consider themselves capable of translating directly into Korean
from Greek. They worked, with the help of their Korean pundits,
from the ‘Delegates’ Version’ Chinese bible. Landis might have
been expected to take a hand in this project. All the other
members of the mission—even Maurice Davies, who was to leave Korea
in 1896 because he failed with the language—did their share of
translation. Yet Landis appears not to have contributed. He
thought the native script a waste of time, because the literature
of educated Koreans was entirely in classical Chinese.