The Griffith New Testament

In the late Qing Dynasty, missionaries sought to improve the readability of Bible translations using simple Chinese. In 1877, John Griffith proposed the translation of the Bible in easy to read Chinese at the Missionary Conference in China. Although John Griffith did not intend to continue the translation, he eventually completed the translation of the four gospels, which was published in 1884. John Griffith used the Greek as a blueprint, referring to the "Beijing Mandarin Translation", "Commissioned Translations" and the translations of Pizhiwen and Kelongcun. Some people criticized this translation, thinking that it was a free translation, or suspected that John Griffith just converted the "Beijing Mandarin Translation" into a simple Chinese version. John Griffith cooperated with some missionaries from Britain, the United States, and Germany to revise the translation.