When the first Protestant missionaries arrived on the China coast in the early nineteenth century, they recognised the importance of translating the Bible into Chinese. These evangelists were convinced that only the Bible revealed the knowledge of salvation. Hence it became essential to make the Scriptures intelligible to the common people in their own language. Given the high culture of and long literary tradition in China, this was by no means an easy task. This effort was further complicated by persistent denominational differences. Joyce Chan's important monograph focuses on the Bible translations of William Dean (1807–95), a member of the American Baptist Missionary Union. The author describes in considerable detail Dean's distinct approach against the background of the controversy surrounding the influential Delegates’ Version of the Bible that was produced by inter-denominational committees in the late 1840s and early 1850s. The disagreement erupted over the so-called ‘term question’, namely the problem of selecting the most suitable translation terms for biblical concepts such as ‘God’, ‘Holy Spirit’ and ‘souls’. Another matter of particular importance to Dean concerns the appropriate translation of ‘baptizo’ (βαπτιζο), i.e. the teaching of believer's baptism by immersion, an ‘issue that touched the core of Baptist identity’ (p. 189). Yet Dean argued that finding appropriate terms was not enough. In order to present the Christian message in distinctive Chinese cultural terms without losing the original meaning, he insisted that in addition to meaningful translation of the Bible extensive explanatory commentary was required. Explanatory notes were, however, rejected by both the American Bible Society and the British and Foreign Bible Society at that time. Chan devotes considerable space to the forces that shaped Dean's approach to evangelism and Bible translation. At Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution in upstate New York he learned to combine modern methodology (German school of historical criticism) as the foundation of biblical scholarship with the Evangelical fervour of the Second Great Awakening. Although Dean's annotated Chinese study Bibles failed to achieve its deserved recognition, Chan nevertheless calls him ‘a pioneer and prophetic voice in establishing Chinese biblical scholarship’ (p. 239) whose making of the Chinese Bible represented a triumph for ‘religious freedom’ (p. 233). Chan certainly offers helpful background information concerning the Chinese historical and cultural context. The work contains, however, certain inaccuracies. Note, for instance, her comment that Robert Morrison had to pay a fine ‘for the Chefoo provincial government to release his employees’ (p. 78). The source cited by her actually reads ‘to the office of the Chefoo’, that is to say, the local prefect (zhifu) at Canton. She states, furthermore, that Dean wrote his commentaries on Genesis and Matthew in response to the Taiping rebel leader Hong Xiuquan's false interpretation of the Bible (pp. 117–18). However, they were published in 1848/49 and 1850/51, respectively, well before foreign missionaries had any knowledge of the Taiping Rebellion. These and a few other minor blemishes do not detract from the excellent quality of this well-researched and informative study of an alternative approach to contextualising the Christian message.