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Greenland has been in the news recently. Despite a Christian presence for a thousand years, Greenland has only had the whole Bible since 1900. This is the story …
Greenland
Greenland is a large island at the top of the Atlantic Ocean. The northern part lies within the Arctic Circle, and the southern tip is in the Atlantic Ocean. It lies between Baffin Island in Canada and Iceland.
The native language of Greenland is known in English simply as Greenlandic, but is called “Kalaallisut” by its own speakers. Greenlandic is an Inuit language (formerly known as Eskimo). It is linguistically related to other languages spoken by the Inuit peoples across the Arctic north, from the Canadian coasts of Labrador, northern Quebec, and Baffin Island, west to Alaska and into Siberia.
Norse Settlement
From the year 986, parts of the coast of Greenland were settled by people (often called Vikings) from Iceland and Norway. They came in large longboats led by Erik the Red, as recalled in sagas. They called the country Greenland to entice settlers and were converted to Christianity about the year 1000.
From Greenland, some Norse went on to explore North America, and remains have been found in northern parts of Canada, which was likely the first Christian presence on the American continent. A cathedral was built in Greenland in 1126. Slowly, contact was lost between them and the rest of the Norse world.
Hans Egede, Apostle to Greenland
Meanwhile, in the Lofoten Islands of northern Norway, Lutheran pastor Rev Hans Poulsen Egede (1686–1758) grew up hearing rumours and stories about the old Norse settlements in Greenland. People discussed whether they were still Catholic and had missed the Reformation, or if they had lost their faith altogether. Egede was determined to find out and bring them into the Lutheran Church.
From 1711, Egede sought permission from King Frederick IV of Denmark and Norway to lead a quest to find the lost colony and establish a Christian mission there. King Frederick IV gave consent and re-established the old colonial claim to the island of Greenland. Egede formed “Det Bergen Grønlandske Compagnie” (Bergen Greenland Company) with investment from merchants, the king, and a missions college.
The Greenland Company was awarded broad powers to govern. Ships left in 1721 with Egede, his wife, and four children, along with forty prospective colonists. They established a town they called Godthåb (Good Hope) and spent months exploring different areas. They found no living Norse settlements, but they did find some remains of where they had been. What Egede did not know, but what we now know through archaeology, was that the Norse settlements had died out around the mid-1400s. The ruins of an ancient church can be seen at Hvalsey, and the remains of the cathedral at Garðar were found in 1926.
Instead, Egede encountered the Inuit communities. He stayed in Greenland and changed the aim of his mission to evangelising the Inuit Greenlanders, reintroducing Christianity to Greenland after a gap of about three centuries. He learnt the local language and, in about 1730, reduced it to writing using a writing system based on Danish. He translated parts of Scripture for them, starting with the Psalms and the Pauline Epistles. He created a dictionary in 1750 and a grammar in 1760. He became known as the “Apostle to Greenland”.
Poul Egede and the New Testament
Hans Egede’s son, Poul Egede, grew up in Greenland among the local people and was fluent in the language. The Gospels were printed in Copenhagen in 1744, revised and printed with Acts in 1758. The complete Greenlandic New Testament was printed as “Testamente nutak” in 1766. From 1733, the gospel spread largely through Moravian missions, which spread across the island. Poul Egede also produced an edition of the metrical Psalms, which was published in 1788.
Danish Bible Society
A second translation was produced by Otto Fabricius, a Danish missionary, who produced a new and better Greenlandic New Testament in 1794. The first edition was destroyed in the Great Fire of Copenhagen in 1795, and a reprint was published in 1799. Later, Niels Giessing Wolf revised Fabricius’s New Testament on behalf of the Danish Bible Society. The revised New Testament was published in 1827.
Kleinschmidt Bible
A Moravian missionary, Johan Conrad (known as Samuel) Kleinschmidt, who was born in Greenland in 1814 and spoke German, Danish, and Greenlandic, worked on translating the New Testament into Greenlandic from the German Lutheran version. In 1822, this was published by the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS). He created a grammar in 1845 and worked on the Old Testament. Later, a Moravian missionary called Valentine Müller revised this 1822 New Testament, which was printed by the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) in 1851.
Samuel Kleinschmidt died in 1886, and the translation work was completed after his death by H. F. Jörgensen, Chr. Rasmussen, and J. Kjer. The revised New Testament was published in 1893, and the Old Testament was completed at the end of the decade. The Old Testament was combined with the 1893 version of the New Testament to create the first full Bible in Greenlandic. It was published in Copenhagen by the Danish government in 1900 and became known as the “Kleinschmidt Bible”. It shaped Greenlandic Christian vocabulary and spirituality for generations, becoming the standard church Bible well into the twentieth century. The New Testament was revised in 1936.
Politics
When Norway gained independence from Denmark in 1814, Greenland remained under Danish rule. In 1979, Greenland achieved home rule from Denmark but remains a constituent country of the Kingdom of Denmark, along with the Faroe Islands. In 1982, many years before Brexit, Greenland was the first country to hold a referendum to leave the European Economic Community (EEC) and left by a very narrow majority. In June 2009, the government of Greenland declared Greenlandic to be the sole official language.
New Translation 1999
In 1973, the spelling system was overhauled with an extensive orthographic reform to make it easier to learn. Work on a new translation into Greenlandic began in the 1980s, using the new orthography. A fresh translation of the Old Testament appeared in 1990. The complete modern Greenlandic Bible was published by the Danish Bible Society in 1999, after sixteen years of work. It was made available in Greenland, and it can be found online on the Danish Bible Society website.
Today, most Greenlanders consider themselves to be Christian, with the vast majority associated with the Lutheran Church of the Diocese of Greenland, which is a diocese of the Church of Denmark.
