James Scarth Gale

Life

Gale was born in 1863 in Ontario, Canada. While a student at the University of Toronto, he is said to have been drawn to missionary work under the influence of Dwight L. Moody and the Student Volunteer Movement. He graduated in 1888, and in December of that year he arrived in Joseon (Korea) as a lay missionary sponsored by the University of Toronto YMCA. He learned Korean and evangelized in Sorae, Hwanghae Province, and in the Gyeongsang region. When YMCA support ended, he transferred around 1891–1892 to the mission of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (Northern Presbyterian) on the recommendation of Horace G. Underwood and Samuel A. Moffett.

In 1892 he married Hattie, the widow of medical missionary John W. Heron. He then moved to Wonsan, where he worked until the late 1890s. In 1900 he became the first senior pastor of Yeonmotgol Church (now Yeondong Church) in Seoul, a post he held until 1927. Hattie died in 1908, and in 1910 he remarried, to an Englishwoman. After resigning from the church in 1927, he moved to his wife's hometown of Bath, England, where he died. Hattie is buried in the Yanghwajin Foreign Missionary Cemetery.

Ministry and Achievements

• Bible translation: From the 1890s Gale served on the Bible translation committee, translating portions of the New Testament such as Matthew and Ephesians, and took part in the early translation of the Korean Bible. He held that a translation should preserve natural Korean idiom even at the cost of a freer, meaning-based rendering. His disagreement with other committee members, who favored a literal, word-for-word approach, eventually led him to leave the committee. In 1925, working with Korean assistants including Yi Won-mo, he published a private translation, the Sinyeok Sin-Gu-yak Jeonseo (New Translation of the Old and New Testaments), also known as the "Korean-idiom Bible."
• The Pilgrim's Progress: In 1895 he translated John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress into Korean and published it in Wonsan as a two-volume woodblock edition. The illustrations, by Kim Jun-geun, depict the characters wearing hanbok and gat (traditional Korean dress and hats). It is regarded as Korea's first modern translated novel.
• Lexicography: In 1897, with the help of his Korean language teacher Yi Chang-jik and others, he published A Korean-English Dictionary in Japan. Containing approximately 35,000 words, it was later revised several times.
• Introducing Korea to the West: He translated Korean classics into English, including Guunmong (The Cloud Dream of the Nine, 1922) and Chunhyangjeon. He also wrote English-language books such as Korean Sketches and Korea in Transition (1909), introducing Korea's history and customs to Western readers.
• Education and church organization: He worked to support the operation of the Gyeongsin School and the Jeongsin Girls' School. According to Yeondong Church records, he was twice elected moderator of the Independent Presbytery, in 1908 and 1910.

Influence on the Korean Church

In an 1894 letter to the mission board, Gale expressed his wish to use "Hananim," a native Korean term, for God. For this reason he is regarded as having contributed to the establishment of "Hananim" as the Korean name for God (see Names of God). At Yeondong Church he ordained as elders Go Chan-ik (1904), a commoner, and Yi Myeong-hyeok (1909), who came from the lowborn class—cases regarded as breaking down the barriers of social status. His translation of The Pilgrim's Progress is said to have played a part in the conversion of Kil Sun-joo. In 1974 Yeondong Church established the Gale Culture Award.

Assessment

Gale is regarded as the missionary with the deepest understanding of the Korean language and culture and as a pioneer of Korean studies. However, his Sinyeok Sin-Gu-yak Jeonseo was not widely read in the churches, because it contained many free renderings and was not an authorized version recognized by the Bible Society. Some analyses suggest that this translation was aimed at an educated upper-class readership. Some scholars interpret the controversy over translation as evidence of the strength of conservative views of Scripture in the early missionary community. In eschatology, research indicates that, like most missionaries of his time, he held to premillennialism and dispensationalism.