Was Gützlaff's Japanese translation of the Gospel of John in the Late Edo Period translated from the Greek Text?

Abstract

This paper aims to identify the original language of the translation of the Gospel of John, which was published in Singapore in 1837, before the end of the Edo period in Japan.

Yohannnesu no Tayori Yorokobi is a Japanese translation of the Gospel of John, the last of the four gospels in the New Testament. It is said to be the oldest existing Japanese translation of the Bible, along with the Japanese translations of the three Epistles of John in the Catholic Epistles of the New Testament. Gützlaff, a missionary from Prussia, translated these books. According to previous studies, Gützlaff translated the Gospel of John into Japanese from the English or German translation. However, this paper compares the proper nouns that appear in the text of the Tenri Library's copy of the Yohannnesu no Tayori Yorokobi with those of the King James Version (English), Luther's Translation (German), and the Textus Receptus (Greek). This study shows that it is highly possible that Gützlaff translated these proper nouns directly from the Greek text.