Albania and the Albanians in the Annual Reports of the British and Foreign Bible Society, 1805–1955 Paperback – Nov. 14 2017
by David Hosaflook (Author)
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SUMMARY OF THE BOOK: This book is a compilation of all the information about the Albanians in the annual reports of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS).
The BFBS was established in 1804, at the onset of an era of unprecedented Protestant missionary expansion across the globe. Because the foundational pillar of Protestantism is "Sola Scriptura" (the Bible alone is the final authority for faith and practice), the first objective of Protestant missions was making the Bible available globally. The Bible Society had a limited focus (it would publish the text of the Scriptures alone, without any accompanying notes or comments) but an unlimited vision (it aimed to publish Bibles in every language possible). It was a massive, privately funded, nondenominational Christian organization that asked one essential question when contemplating whether or not to engage with a particular nation: “Do the people there have Bibles in their mother tongue that they can read for themselves?”
In its first one hundred years, the British and Foreign Bible Society translated, printed, or distributed Scriptures in an astounding 412 of the world’s languages—an average of four new languages per year. Remarkably, the Albanian language became a focus of the BFBS was early as 1816, just twelve years after the BFBS was established. Albanian was approximately the twentieth project the BFBS undertook.
When the BFBS entered Albanian history, there was no Albanian Bible or New Testament available to the people. This is almost incredible when considering the many centuries of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christian influence in Albanian territories. The publication of an Albanian New Testament in 1827 was a triumph for the Albanian people and became a standard text for foreign linguists studying Albanian, putting the language on the world’s linguistic map. Between 1827 and 1908 alone, the British and Foreign Bible Society printed approximately 55,000 copies of the Albanian Scriptures, in both Gheg and Tosk, in twenty-seven unique editions. The society translated and published all the books of the New Testament and several books from the Old Testament. Perhaps more significantly, they took the initiative to distribute the books among the Albanian people, amidst extremely harsh circumstances and the opposition of religious and political leaders.
Each year the BFBS printed a detailed annual report about its work all over the world. The information in the reports was intended to be a condensed summary of the Society’s work, as reported by its workers. The Albanians were first mentioned in the 1817 report and were mentioned in nearly every successive report until 1955. This resource is a compilation of material, extracted from the annual reports, about Albania and the Albanians, but it also contains information about other nations insofar as such information assists readers to understand the context and progress of the Albanian work in the context of the Ottoman Balkans.
Because the BFBS began its work for the Albanian Bible at the beginning of the nineteenth century and continued working intensely until the communist era, its reports are useful as a running historical commentary and chronology of Albanian conditions predating the Albanian National Awakening and extending well beyond Albania’s emergence as an independent nation. As demonstrated by the lengthy index in the back of this book, the extracts herein contain information about a wide breadth of topics and will serve historians and linguists as a fascinating reference work.
This book’s primary value, however, is to readers who wish to understand the long and adventurous story of how the Albanians received and started reading the Bible in their own dialect, and how something so simple became so significant to Albania’s national cause.
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