Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Bishop of Shanghai
October 14 · d. 1906
also known as Samuel Schereschewsky, S.I.J. Schereschewsky
Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky (1831-1906) was a Lithuanian-born Jew who came to faith in Christ, was ordained in the Episcopal Church, and became the third missionary bishop of Shanghai. He gave his life to putting the whole Bible into the hands of the Chinese in their own language, and when a stroke left him paralyzed in 1881 he did not lay the work down: for his last twenty-five years he typed his translations with a single finger. His feast is October 14.
Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky was born in 1831 in Tauroggen, a small town on the western edge of the Russian Empire, today Tauragė in Lithuania. His parents were Jewish, and he was raised for the life they wanted most for a promising boy: to become a rabbi. He was still a young man studying at a rabbinical school in Zhytomyr when a friend gave him a small book he had never been permitted to read closely before, a New Testament in Hebrew.
He read it as a scholar reads, hunting for what did not fit. Instead he found, page after page, the very prophecies of Israel's own Scriptures answered in the man from Nazareth. It unsettled him for years before it converted him. He left for Germany to study further, and there, sitting one day at the back of a church while the light through a window struck the crucifix at the front, something in him that had been circling the truth for years finally came to rest in it. He sailed for America, and in the spring of 1855, at a Christian Passover table in New York, he said aloud what he had already come to believe.
He trained for ministry, first among the Presbyterians, then, persuaded of its order and its historic form, in the Episcopal Church. He was ordained deacon in 1859, and before the year was out he had sailed for China, the mission field he had asked for himself. He arrived in Shanghai just before Christmas.
China gave him a use for the gift he had always had. He learned Mandarin so completely that no other Western missionary of his generation matched him in its idiom, and in time he could speak thirteen languages and read twenty more. He set that mastery to a single task: putting the Bible into Chinese that ordinary readers could actually understand. Working first in Shanghai and then in Peking, he translated the Old Testament into Mandarin, finished in 1874, and revised the Mandarin New Testament that other missionaries had begun. In 1877 the church made him bishop of Shanghai, and two years into his episcopate he founded a school that would grow into St. John's University, meant to raise up Chinese men to lead their own church.
Then, in August 1881, laboring through the punishing Shanghai heat, he collapsed. What struck him left him paralyzed in every limb and slurred his speech. Doctors ordered him home. For a time he could not lift a pen. His fellow bishops, and in time Schereschewsky himself, judged that a bishop who could no longer travel his diocese or lay hands on his clergy could not go on serving as bishop, and by 1884 he had given up the office.
He did not give up the work. Confined to a chair, he found he could still move one finger of his right hand, and with that single finger, tapping out one Chinese character at a time on a typewriter, he set out to do what no one had done before: to give China a Bible in Easy Wenli, the literary Chinese that educated readers across every province could read regardless of their spoken dialect, and to revise his Mandarin Old Testament besides. His wife Susan sat beside him for years as his secretary, turning his halting dictation into fair copy. He worked some nine hours a day, checking his Chinese against Hebrew and Greek and a dozen other tongues he still carried in his memory though his body would barely obey him. Near the end of his life he told a friend, "I have sat in this chair for over twenty years. It seemed very hard at first. But God knew best. He kept me for the work for which I am best fitted."
He finished the Easy Wenli Bible in 1902. The church in China came to call it, and its Mandarin companion, the "one-finger Bible," and for a generation it was the Bible most Chinese Christians actually held and read, feeding in time even the great Union Version that succeeded it. Schereschewsky died in Tokyo on October 15, 1906, having given the last quarter of his life, one keystroke at a time, to hand his adopted people the whole of Scripture in their own tongue. A man who could no longer stand, no longer walk, no longer even speak clearly, left the Chinese church a gift that has outlasted every one of his limitations, because the God who called him to that chair had not called him to be idle in it.
How we know Schereschewsky is unusually well documented for a nineteenth-century missionary: mission society records, his own extensive correspondence, the biography written within a generation of his death by James Arthur Muller, and, more recently, the scholarly study by the historian Irene Eber, who worked from archival letters and from Schereschewsky's own translation notes. The outline of his life is not in serious dispute; what is worth handling with care is the texture of a conversion story assembled from several partly independent tellings, and the exact terms of his 1883-84 resignation.
Schereschewsky was born on 6 May 1831 in Tauroggen, then in the Russian Empire, in the region called Lithuania, today the town of Tauragė. He was orphaned young and raised, by most accounts, by an older half-brother, a timber merchant, who gave him the education a family destined him for the rabbinate would expect. At a rabbinical school in Zhytomyr he was given a Hebrew translation of the New Testament, distributed by a missionary society, and later biographers agree that close study of it began an intellectual reckoning with messianic prophecy that took years to resolve into conviction. He went on to study in Germany, at Breslau and Frankfurt, and it was there, on the traditional account, that a moment of unlooked-for feeling in a church, the sight of a crucifix catching a shaft of light, completed what study had begun. He emigrated to the United States in 1854, was baptized in 1855, and studied for ministry first at the Presbyterian Western Theological Seminary before transferring to the Episcopal Church's General Theological Seminary in New York, drawn, he later said, to its historic order.
He was ordained deacon on 17 July 1859 and sailed for China within months, reaching Shanghai on 21 December 1859; he was ordained priest there the following year by Bishop William Boone. He worked first in Shanghai and, from 1862, in Peking, serving on the missionary committee charged with a new Mandarin New Testament. His own major undertaking was the Old Testament: a Mandarin version, drawing on Hebrew, Greek, and a wide comparative reading in other translations, completed in 1874 and published by the American Bible Society. On 31 October 1877 he was consecrated bishop of Shanghai at Grace Church in Manhattan, and in 1879, still early in his episcopate, he founded St. John's College (later St. John's University), intending it to train a native Chinese clergy and lay leadership rather than leave the church in China permanently dependent on foreign missionaries.
In August 1881 severe heat exhaustion, compounded by years of overwork, produced what his physicians took to be a brain lesion; it left him paralyzed in his arms and legs and impaired his speech. He was sent home for treatment and only partially recovered. Accounts differ on how much the resignation that followed, tendered around 1883 and effective in 1884, was purely a matter of incapacity and how much it was sharpened by disagreements with a fellow missionary over churchmanship; what is not in doubt is that a bishop who could no longer travel or confirm his own candidates could not continue to hold the office as it was then understood, and Schereschewsky himself accepted that judgment.
Schereschewsky is remembered above all as the "one-finger Bible" translator, the name Chinese Christians themselves gave to the Mandarin and Easy Wenli Scriptures he completed after paralysis had taken nearly everything else from him. His feast falls on October 14 in the calendar of the Episcopal Church, kept as bishop and missionary, and the day is marked with particular warmth among Christians with ties to the church in China, where he is remembered by his Chinese name, Shi Yuese (施約瑟). St. John's University, the school he founded in Shanghai in 1879, grew into one of China's leading institutions before its closure under Communist rule, and remains part of his legacy even where its later, more secular history departed from his founding hope of a native Christian leadership. He is honored chiefly as a scholar-saint: a man converted from the faith of his fathers who spent the fullness of his gifts, learned languages and failing body alike, in service of putting God's word into the hands of a people not his own.
Mandarin Old Testament(Chinese (Mandarin), 1875)
His pioneering translation of the Old Testament into vernacular Mandarin, later revised and expanded into his full Bible.
Public domain: Internet Archive
Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, in the Chinese Literary Language, Plain Style (the Easy Wenli Bible)(Chinese (Wenli), 1902)
His own translation of the whole Bible into literary Chinese, typed out over roughly two decades from a wheelchair with a single working finger; the finished monument of his last years of labor.
Public domain: American Bible Society edition (1902), Internet Archive
Apostle of China: Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky, 1831-1906(English, 1937)
The standard biography, researched from mission-board archives and the testimony of those who had known Schereschewsky, including his widow, within a generation of his death; long out of print but freely readable and borrowable.
Public domain: Internet Archive (borrow)
The Jewish Bishop and the Chinese Bible: S. I. J. Schereschewsky, 1831-1906(English, 1999)
The standard modern scholarly study, particularly valuable on his rabbinical formation and the linguistic decisions of his Chinese translations; in print from Brill.
Public domain: Bookshop.org
Primary sources. Schereschewsky's own translations survive in the texts themselves: his Mandarin Old Testament (American Bible Society, 1874-75) and his Easy Wenli Bible, "Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, in the Chinese literary language, plain style" (American Bible Society, 1902), both still readable online. His own account of the missionary controversy over Chinese theological terminology appears in his 1888 pamphlet on the Bible, Prayer Book, and terms used in the China missions.
Recommended modern biography. James Arthur Muller's Apostle of China, Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky, 1831-1906 (Morehouse Publishing, 1937) is the standard biography, written within a generation of its subject's death from mission-society records and personal testimony, and it remains the readable door into his life; out of print but borrowable at the Internet Archive. Irene Eber's The Jewish Bishop and the Chinese Bible: S. I. J. Schereschewsky (1831-1906) (Brill, 1999) is the standard scholarly study, drawing on archival letters and Schereschewsky's own translation notes to examine his Jewish youth, his conversion, and his translation method in detail; the deeper, more academic second step for a reader who wants the full documentary record.
Further reading. The Biographical Dictionary of Chinese Christianity carries a concise scholarly account of his career and translation work; Marshall Broomhall's 1907 sketch of Protestant missionary history in China records the often-quoted description of Schereschewsky in his last years, "paralysed in every limb, and with his powers of speech partly gone, sitting for nearly twenty-five years in the same chair, slowly and painfully typing out with two fingers his Mandarin translation."
Online resources. Both the Mandarin Old Testament and the Easy Wenli Bible are digitized and freely readable at the Internet Archive; Muller's biography is borrowable there as well.
What happened next is the part of his life the church has most wanted to remember. Returning to the United States and later settling for a time in Japan to oversee printing, Schereschewsky spent his last twenty-some years revising his Mandarin Old Testament and producing, for the first time, a complete Bible in Easy Wenli, the literary register of Chinese that a reader from any province could follow. He had lost the use of nearly every finger; he typed with the one that remained, or at times held a stylus in his fist, for hours a day, with his wife Susan Mary Waring Schereschewsky serving for years as his secretary and amanuensis. He told a friend near the end of his life, as James Arthur Muller records in his 1937 biography, "I have sat in this chair for over twenty years. It seemed very hard at first. But God knew best. He kept me for the work for which I am best fitted." Missionaries in China came to speak of the resulting Mandarin and Easy Wenli Bibles as the "one-finger Bible," and a contemporary called him simply the greatest Bible translator China had had. His Old Testament work fed directly into the Chinese Union Version that would in time supersede his own, remaining the standard reference for Chinese Old Testament study well into the twentieth century.
He died in Tokyo on 15 October 1906 and is buried there. The Episcopal Church keeps his feast on 14 October, the eve of his death, honoring him as bishop and missionary; its collect for the day asks that his example and his perseverance might teach the church to commit its own gifts to God's service.
O God, our heavenly Father, you raised up your faithful servant Samuel Isaac Joseph Schereschewsky to be a Bishop and pastor in your Church and to feed your flock: Give abundantly to all pastors the gifts of your Holy Spirit, that they may minister in your household as true servants of Christ and stewards of your divine mysteries; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Readings for a Pastor
Isaiah 6:1–8Psalm 71:16–23v1 Peter 5:1–11 or Acts 20:24–35Matthew 24:42–50