When Protestant missionaries first undertook the task of translating the Bible into Chinese, they had to decide what kind of Chinese to translate it into. Robert Morrison (1782–1834) and William Milne (1785–1822), the primary creators of the earliest complete Chinese translation of the Bible, wrote their version in classical Chinese, a formal and archaic written language that had high cultural status as the medium of government, scholarship, elite literature, and the civil service examinations. It did not, however, speak to those without a classical education. Classical Chinese is so far removed from spoken Chinese that it is virtually incomprehensible when read aloud. Some other early translations rendered the Bible, or parts of it, into regional vernaculars, as well as varieties of Mandarin. It took nearly a century to create an authoritative Bible in standard Mandarin, a written national language that was coming into being in the early twentieth century.

One of the unintended outcomes of the Protestant Reformation was that vernacular translations of the Bible, in particular Luther's German and Tynsdale's English Bibles, fostered development of national languages. George Kam Wah Mak makes a convincing case that Chinese translations of the Bible enriched and helped standardize Mandarin as China's national language in the Republican period (1912–1949). The Chinese Bible, he writes, thus contributed to the development of Mandarin as “a linguistic means for the Chinese people to conceive of themselves as being what Benedict Anderson called a ‘horizontal comradeship’ within a national context” (9). Mak focuses especially on the 1919 Mandarin Union Version (MUV), which became the standard version used by 99% of Chinese Protestants by the end of the Republican era. It met the need for a vernacular Bible that could be read aloud for preaching, in a language understood widely in north, central, and southwest China. It was published under the “without note or comment” principle, as an unmediated text that transcended denominational differences and encouraged individual reading and ownership of the Bible.

One might object, of course, that Christians in China constituted such a small minority—about one tenth of one percent of the population by 1949—that the linguistic impact of the Chinese Bible could not approach that of vernacular Bibles in Germany or England. Nonetheless, the Bible was one of the most widely circulated Mandarin books in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century China. It even shaped the language of the non-Christian, and indeed anti-religious, New Culture intelligentsia. Mak builds on and complements Jost Zetzsche's The Bible in China: The History of the Union Version or the Culmination of the Protestant Missionary Bible Translation in China (Institute Monumenta Serica, 1999). Mak's particular contribution is his focus on the MUV's influence on Chinese language. He draws from an admirable command of biblical Hebrew, Aramaic, New Testament Greek, as well as classical and modern Chinese.

One challenge in dealing with this topic is the vagueness of the term “Mandarin.” It was first used to refer to a koiné “official language” (guanhua 官話), a spoken lingua franca that officials (mandarins) used throughout the empire. It corresponded roughly to the language spoken widely across north, central, and southwest China, with significant tonal and lexical variations. The dialect spoken in Beijing, purified of Beijing localisms, eventually served as the foundation of the National Language (guoyu 國語) in the Republican period (1912–1949) and the Standard Language (putong hua 普通話) in the People's Republic. It also became the basis of the written vernacular Chinese (baihua 白話) that, as a result of the New Culture movement, began supplacing classical Chinese as the standard written national language (guowen 國文) in the 1920s.

As Mak demonstrates, the MUV introduced or popularized several neologisms in modern Mandarin, including fandui 反對 (to oppose), shijie 世界 (the world, originally appearing in Buddhist texts with a different meaning), xiaoxi 消息 (news), yijian 意見 (opinion), and ziyou自由 (freedom). He suggests that Hebrew and Greek syntax influenced some grammatical innovations in modern Chinese, such as the transposition of the yinwei 因為 subordinate clause. The MUV also used some classical particles and connectors, for example, erqie 而且 (moreover) and huozhe 或者 (or) “to supplement the deficiency of spoken Mandarin” (75).

Many Chinese educational and intellectual leaders of the time, though generally secular and often suspicious of Christianity, were familiar with the Chinese Bible. The novelist Shen Congwen 沈從文 (1902–1988) studied the MUV as a model of narrative technique and to master the use of punctuation. Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1967) assigned the MUV translations of Ecclesiastes and the Book of Esther in his literature classes at Yenching University, and in 1921 Zhou gave a speech entitled “The Bible and Chinese Literature.”  Xia Miancun 夏丏尊 (1886–1946), editor of the widely-disseminated textbook Guowen baiba ke 國文百八課 (One hundred and Eight Lessons in the National [Written] Language), regarded familiarity of the Bible as “common knowledge” and included an excerpt from Genesis in his text, entitled “The Hebrew Myth of Creation” (Xibolai kaipi shenhua 希伯來開闢神話). The MUV thus reached not only Chinese Christians, but a wider reading public as well.

George Mak's work is a significant contribution to the study of the modern Chinese language as well as the history of Chinese Protestantism and its relationship to Chinese culture.